As you might have heard, Sweden has a refugee problem.
We’ve spent quite a bit of time documenting the country’s trials and travails over the course of the last 12 months during which time Sweden has taken on more than 160,000 asylum seekers.
Donald Trump says he’s “tough on immigration,” and maybe he is.
But not like Hungarian PM Viktor Orban.
Last September, when things began to get out of hand on the Balkan route north to Germany, Orban decided to build a 100 mile long, 12-foot high razor wire migrant-be-gone fence on his country’s border with Serbia. Some refugees didn’t like that and decided to test Orban’s resolve. Here’s what happened next:
And here’s a chart which shows the rather dramatic effect Orban’s crackdown had on migrant flows into Hungary:
Over the weekend, we presented what according to Bank of America was perhaps the last remaining bullish catalyst for a big market move higher when Bank of America's Michael Hartnett said that "we remain sellers into strength in coming weeks/months of risk assets at least until a coordinated and aggressive global policy response (e.g. Shanghai Accord) begins to reverse the deterioration in global profit expectations and credit conditions."
Three weeks into January things were looking rather grim.
Plunging crude, jitters about the ongoing (and increasingly unpredictable) yuan devaluation, and spillovers to global risk assets stemming from an ill-fated attempt by Chinese regulators to implement a stock market circuit breaker got US equities off to one of their worst Januarys in history.