Europe

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

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.