Europe

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

Gold is up 19% year-to-date, by far the best performing asset-class, making this the best start to a year since 1974.

"Negative rates in Japan and Europe coupled with weak global growth have prompted a surge in interest," notes one trader as Gold-backed exchange-traded funds saw a record inflow of $7.2bn in February, surpassing the previous high set in 2009, according to BlackRock.

Submitted by MN Gordon via EconomicPrism.com,

“There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch,” is one of the essential axioms of economics.  No doubt about it, there’s no getting around this simple truth.  Everything has a price.