Originally posted Op-Ed via The Wall Street Journal,
These are strange monetary times, with negative interest rates and central bankers deemed to be masters of the universe. So maybe we shouldn’t be surprised that politicians and central bankers are now waging a war on cash. That’s right, policy makers in Europe and the U.S. want to make it harder for the hoi polloi to hold actual currency.
If we learned anything last September it’s that Janet Yellen’s reaction function now includes domestic and global financial markets.
Well that, and we learned that Hungarian PM Viktor Orban isn’t playing around when it comes to Europe’s worsening refugee crisis. While everyone else in Europe was busy trying to figure out how to accommodate the millions of asylum seekers fleeing the war-torn Mid-East, Orban simply built a razor wire border fence.
And then he built another one.
Just when traders thought that the biggest and most violent 3-day short squeeze in 7 years was about to end...
... a squeeze that has resulted in 3 consecutive 1%+ sessions for the S&P for the first time since October 2011, overnight we got one of the Fed's biggest faux-hakws, St. Louis Fed's Jim Bullard, who said that it would be "unwise" to continue hiking rates at this moment, and hinted that "if needed", the most natural option for the Fed going forward would be to do further Q.E.
Terror attacks have repeatedly rocked Turkey over the last year.
The government has blamed ISIS and Kurds for the attacks ... and is about to use this "justification" to launch troops into Syria.
But there is an alternative explanation. Specifically, government officials have admitted that Turkey has repeatedly carried out false flag attacks.
For example: