Europe

A senior retired NATO general has predicted that Russia will start a world war in exactly a year from now. General Sir Richard Shirreff, who served as Nato’s Deputy Supreme Allied Commander in Europe said that a Russian attack on Estonia, Lithuania or Latvia, which are all Nato members, was a serious possibility and that the West should act now to avert “potential catastrophe”. A Russia insider report: BRACE YOURSELF: Ex-Deputy NATO Commander Predicts Russia Will Start WW3 in May 2017 We’re not kidding, he is actually that specific General Sir Richard Shirreff This is unbelievable.

Dow futures are up 130 points since Europe opened helped by a drop in JPY and EUR and a buying spike in crude oil once again...

Oil has taken out yesterday's highs...

US equity fuitures are soaring...

As Euro tumbles...

As reported yesterday, adding insult to injury to a bank that just hours earlier admitted that in addition to rigging everything else it has also been caught engaging in "stock fraud" at the same time as a new mortgage probe was launched against it, Deutsche Bank's senior debt rating was downgraded by Moody's to Baa2, just two notches above junk. For the bank with the tens of trillions in derivatives, being seen as an increasingly more distressed counterparty was not good news and explains why the CEO took the unexpected step of having to defend his firm following the downgrade.

Following the demise of the thousand year-long tradition of Swiss banking secrecy, crushed virtually overnight by Barack Obama's demands to make the central European nation's banking industry transparent, one of the major consequences was the shift in money laundering from Geneva and Zurich to the latest and greatest "anonymous" banking and tax evasion hub located halfway around the world, namely Singapore.

Europe's crackdown on both individual and corporate tax evaders hit a new high this morning when according to French daily Le Parisien, French tax officials raided the Paris offices of Google early Tuesday in a probe into possible tax evasion.

The raids follows a complaint by the French finance ministry, paper says. Acccording to Bloomberg, prosecutors and Al Verney, a spokesman for Google in Brussels, didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment.