Europe

Submitted by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

As a direct result of Europe's refugee crisis, new and very unpleasant social fractures have started to emerge.

One particularly troubling issue is the extent to which officials have tended to “blame the victim" in the ever more frequent sex attacks resulting from Europe's refugee surge, something we first touched upon earlier this week. For instance, Cologne mayor Henriette Reker drew sharp criticism for suggesting that it was German womens' duty to prevent assaults by keeping would-be assailants “at arm’s length.”

On Thursday, after the ECB's stunning announcement that it would for the first time start monetizing corporate debt, we joked - or so we thought - that "within 6-9 months we expect to add a chart showing Europe's junk bond market which will be next on the monetization menu, followed shortly after by equities and kitchen sinks."

As it turns out, this wasn't a joke, and overnight JPM's Nikolaos Panigirtzoglou explained what to "expect" next from the ECB:

A War was the Danish submission to the Oscars this year for Best Foreign Language Film of 2015. It lost out to a Hungarian movie set in a Holocaust concentration camp, but A War is well worth seeing, with or without awards. It’s in Danish, with large and clear English subtitles—you will have no problem following the action.

In a historic first, earlier today ECB vice president Vitor Constancio (the same one who in October 2014 explained that the European stress tests refuse to consider a scenario with deflation  "because indeed we don't consider that deflation is going to happen" just a few months before Europe got its first deflationary print since the crisis) penned an official ECB opinion piece, some might call it a blog post, titled "In Defense of Monetary Policy" just hours after the ECB's historic "all in" gamble which included the first ever monetization of corporate b