Europe

On the surface, today's 2Y auction was not too bad: pricing at a 0.877% high yield, this stopped 0.5 bps through the 0.882% When Issued.

That was as good as it got, because the internals were a disaster: the Bid to Cover plunged from 2.907 to just 2.578, the lowest BTC since Dec 2008 and clearly well below the 12TTM average of 3.17. Almost as if investors are no longer too sure in the short end... which makes sense: neither is the Fed, at least until it too unleashes NIRP.

Francois-Xavier de Donnea, former Minister-President of the Brussels region, former mayor of the city and Belgian politician, discusses security in and around Brussels following the terrorist attacks and how to contain radicalism in the European capital. He believes there is a need to work more on an international basis in Europe, saying some kind of European FBI should be established and suggests having a single police and intelligence organisation, working for the whole of the European Union.

Submitted by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

Europe is the birthplace of Western civilization and the source of most of the trends and bodies of knowledge that define modernity. The average European speaks several languages versus sometimes less than one for Americans. They are, in short, a well-schooled people with vast accumulated wisdom.

With European markets closed across the continent on Monday as the Easter holiday continues, overnight Asia was busy with the Shanghai Composite letting off some steam, and closing down 0.7% at session lows on concerns the Shanghai and Shenzhen home bubble have been popped prematurely by the politburo.

We have come to associate the term “technocrats” with the kind of unelected and non-political experts that serve in European governments, particularly those responding to the recent financial crisis that has devastated several economies there. For example, economists like Mario Monti who served as Italy’s prime minister from 2011 to 2013, leading a government of technocrats in the wake of the Italian debt crisis. Their task wasn’t to transform the economic status quo in Italy, but to use their knowledge and expertise to fix that country’s economy.