Europe

It would funny to watch as Chinese policymakers attempt to pull off the impossible if it weren’t so downright frightening.

Beijing, long the global engine for growth and trade, finds itself at a rather vexing crossroads. NBS protestations to the contrary, the Chinese economy is decelerating rapidly in the face of a massive rebalancing towards consumption and services-led growth. The country’s move away from a smokestack economy has for all intents and purposes reset assumptions regarding how we think about global trade.

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Politicizing Sports

Paul Craig Roberts

One of the world’s best female tennis players, Maria Sharapova, has been suspended, because a medicine she has been taking legally under a doctor’s prescription for ten years was suddenly retroactively declared to be a prohibited substance that is a “metabolic modulator.”

"The AfD is a party that is not bringing together society and not offering the appropriate solutions for the problems, but it is stirring up prejudice and polarizing.”

That’s from Angela Merkel who spoke last Saturday to Bild am Sonntag about the threat she believes the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany party poses to the country.

Apparently, voters weren’t listening.

Submitted by Pater Tenebrarum via Acting-Man.com,

A Whiff of Panic

Ahead of Thursday’s ECB meeting, there was a widespread consensus that Europe’s chief printing press supervisor would make up for the alleged “mistake” of under-delivering on monetary lunacy last time around. Therefore, a sizable dose of fresh absurdities had to be expected, with only small disagreements on the details. It is fair to say the man didn’t disappoint.

Draghobert the Terrible, trying to assault the euro again

Negative interest rates may or may not be a thing of the past (many thought that the ECB had learned its lesson, and then Vitor Constancio wrote a blog post showing that the ECB hasn't learned a damn thing), but the confusion about their significance remains. Here is Deutsche Bank's Dominic Konstam explaining how, among many other things including why Europe will need to "tax" cash before this final Keynesian experiment is finally over, negative rates are merely the logical failure of globalization.

Misconceptions about negative rates