Europe

• Oil Drops With Emerging-Market Currencies on Rig Recovery Signs (BBG)
• A plea for help - How China asked the Fed for its stock crash play book (Reuters)
• Obama to meet Raul Castro on historic Cuba trip (Reuters)
• Wall Street's Pile of Unwanted Treasuries Exposes Market Cracks (BBG)
• Dimon's Timing Looks Savvier by the Day as Equities Rebound (BBG)
• Brazilians Brace for More Drama at Top Court, Congress (BBG)
• Captured Paris Terror Suspect Salah Abdeslam Says He Planned More Attacks (WSJ)

The sarcastic highlight of the overnight session was the Chinese stock market, where just one month after injecting a record amount of new loans into the financial system, the PBOC lamented the danger posed by China's tremendous debt load: "Lending as a share of GDP, especially corporate lending as a share of GDP, is too high" People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan told China Development Forum yesterday.

Last Thurssday, the Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter and the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chair General Joseph Dunford testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC). The topic? The President’s defense budget request for next year.

The nearly three-hour hearing covered everything from the fight against ISIS in Syria to NASA’s research and development projects. But what was remarkable, other than senators using valuable time with Secretary Carter to broker pet projects, was the evident reevaluation of threats to the U.S.

The Hungarian PM Viktor Orbán gave a powerful speech recently calling on the EU project to dismantle and allow its member states to decide their own future.  His message needs to be heard and spread far and wide. The Prime Minister urged the public to not allow faceless, unelected, tax-exempt rulers of the EU and UN to continue to allow the deliberate destruction of its countries via mass immigration through its open-borders.

A former Russian foreign minister has warned that a nuclear war between Russia and Europe is highly likely to happen any day now, due to strained relations between Russia and the West.  Igor Ivanov said the risk of World War 3 is the biggest it has ever been, “The risk of confrontation with the use of nuclear weapons in Europe is higher than in the 1980s.” Express.co.uk reports: Both Russia and the United States have fewer nuclear weapons than in the Cold War period but with just over 7,000 nuclear warheads each, they still have about 90 per cent of world stocks, according to the Stockholm