Europe

The biggest catalyst for overnight markets, first reported on this site, was the announcement by Kuwait that its oil workers had ended their strike which disrupted oil production in the 4th largest OPEC producer for 3 days cutting it by as much as 1.7 mmb/d, and had served to offset the negative news from the Doha debacle. Kuwait Petroleum also added that it would boost output to 3m b/d within 3 days, which in turn has pressured the price of oil overnight, and the May WTI contract was back to just over $40 at last check, sliding 2%.

“The condition upon which God hath given liberty to man,” the Irish statesman John Philpot Curran said in 1790, “is eternal vigilance.” Jacob T. Levy would surely agree, since his book Rationalism, Pluralism, and Freedom powerfully shows that we can entrust the protection of liberty neither to centralized states that relate directly to individuals through unified legal codes nor to the myriad associations that stand between the state and the individual, such as churches, families, and even local governments.

Authored by Paul Craig Roberts,

When Ronald Reagan turned his back on the neoconservatives, fired them, and had some of them prosecuted, his administration was free of their evil influence, and President Reagan negotiated the end of the Cold War with Soviet President Gorbachev. The military/security complex, the CIA, and the neocons were very much against ending the Cold War as their budgets, power, and ideology were threatened by the prospect of peace between the two nuclear superpowers.

A funny thing happened when US slapped a major tariff on China's steel exports... prices exploded higher. But the almost 50% surge in steel prices since mid-December back to 15-month highs have left traders equally split on what happens next.

Submitted by John Browne via Euro Pacific Capital,