Europe

Once every four years my social media feed goes bananas; hundreds of colleagues in my native USA promise that the upcoming election will the most important moment in history, the last chance to fulfill our promise as leaders of the planet or save ourselves from sliding into totalitarian darkness. This time around I know people who have supported Trump, Rubio, Paul, Cruz, Carson, Clinton, Sanders, and Stein, with every fan base seeing themselves as hobbits standing up to Sauron.

In the wake of the Brussels attacks, European ministers are reportedly preparing to push through new legislation giving security agencies direct access to telecommunications and other online data. EU ministers are gathering in Brussels to discuss ‘policy’ in a push to combat terrorism.

The main catalyst that pushed the price of oil from a 13 year low in early February, when crude briefly traded in the mid-$20 to well over 50% higher less than one month later in one of the world's most furious short squeezes, was the recurring infatuation with the fabricated narrative that OPEC would if not cut production then, then at least freeze it.

We mocked this, as recently as one month ago, when we wrote "About That "Oil Freeze": Russian Crude Production Sets New Post-Soviet Record In February" an article which was self-explanatory:

Submitted by John Mauldin via MauldinEconomics.com,

Last month I ran across a fascinating study by economist John Cochrane. He is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, former University of Chicago professor, and adjunct scholar with the Cato Institute. 

Cochrane wrote a paper on economic growth last year as part of a project to design presidential debate questions where he took a matter-of-fact approach to the growth problem. 

The Associated Press reports:

The Islamic State group has trained at least 400 fighters to target Europe in deadly waves of attacks, deploying interlocking terror cells like the ones that struck Brussels and Paris with orders to choose the time, place and method for maximum chaos, officials have told The Associated Press.

The network of agile and semiautonomous cells shows the reach of the extremist group in Europe even as it loses ground in Syria and Iraq.