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.

Submitted by Nick Giambruno via InternationalMan.com,

“It’s a big club and you ain’t in it!”

I’m often reminded of these words, spoken by the great comedian George Carlin, when I read about the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland.

As the in-out debate on the future of Britain’s membership of the European Union seems to favour a Brexit outcome – the pound sterling has fallen against the U.S. dollar.  The British pound fell against the dollar due to very real fears that Britain will vote to leave Europe in the June 23 referendum. Telesurtv.net reports: The sterling fell to a near seven-year low during the session after popular London Mayor Boris Johnson said he would campaign to leave the EU ahead of a June 23 referendum.

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: