Europe

After a burst of volatility in the developed market over the past month, one odd outlier was China, where after a surge of gut-wrenching moves in both its currency and equity markets (recall that it was China's troubles with marketwide circuit breakers at the start of January that may have catalyzed the global volatility wave), Chinese stocks remained relatively quiet and resilient, levitating quietly day after day. That all changed overnight when the Shanghai Composite plunged by 6.4% with the drop accelerating into the close.

Presidents have more latitude in foreign affairs than in domestic policy, and the trend over the past two administrations has been for presidents to be more hawkish than their campaign pledges led voters to expect. George W. Bush promised a “humble foreign policy.” Instead, he gave us the Iraq War. Barack Obama was elected in part to end Bush’s wars. But he too pursued regime change, with Pyrrhic success in Libya and abortively in Syria.

"Everybody should be worried.. and be prepared," warns legendary investor Jim Rogers, as he sees the market "facing a bigger collapse than in 2008," and the central banks will be unable to kick the can much longer. "This is the first time in recorded history where you have Central Banks & governments setting out to destroy the people who save & invest," Rogers exclaims and "the markets are telling us that something is wrong - we're getting close."

The Norwegian Prime Minister Erna Solberg has warned that Sweden is about to collapse due to the overwhelming influx of refugees in the country.  Solberg is so concerned with its imminent collapse that she has created an emergency law to seal Norway’s borders in case “it all breaks down” in Sweden. Zerohedge.com reports: “It is a force majeure proposals which we will have in the event that it all breaks down, the power just comes, and all end in Norway because we are at the top and most of Europe.

Two weeks ago, on one of the slides in a Morgan Stanley presentation, we found something which we thought was quite disturbing. According to the bank's head of EMEA research Huw van Steenis, while in Davos, he sat "next to someone in policy circles who argued that we should move quickly to a cashless economy so that we could introduce negative rates well below 1% – as they were concerned that Larry Summers' secular stagnation was indeed playing out and we would be stuck with negative rates for a decade in Europe.