Europe

Via Scotiabank's Guy Haselmann,

A well-known central banker once said to me, “if you don’t have a Plan B, then you don’t have a plan”.  When he spoke those words over a year ago, he was referring to the Fed’s lack of an exit strategy from zero rates and its QE-swollen balance sheet. He was telling me that the Fed was so focused on bettering ‘today’ through aggressive stimulus that it could not worry about ‘tomorrow’. He speculated that central banks were “terrified of looking as if they were doing too little”.

The news keeps getting better for Donald Trump, a man who is fortunate in his critics and enemies:

Inserting himself into the Republican presidential race, Pope Francis on Wednesday suggested that Donald J. Trump “is not Christian” because of the harshness of his campaign promises to deport more immigrants and force Mexico to pay for a wall along the border.

Sweden has found itself at the center of the refugee debate in Europe.

On the heels of the sexual assaults that allegedly occurred in Cologne, Germany on New Year’s Eve, several Swedish media sources came forward with allegations that authorities conspired to cover up a wave of attacks perpetrated by Arab youths at a festival held at central Stockholm’s Kungsträdgården last August.

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.