Europe

With China celebrating the Lunar New Year and offline until next weekend, and with the US in the usual post-payrolls macro newsflow lull, the markets will have more than enough time to stew in the latest source of contagion fears, namely Europe, the same Europe which until recently was fixed but is broken all over again. The highlight of the week will be Janet Yellen's semi-annual testimony to Congress where she is expected to confirm she is trapped: either push the market even lower by sounding hawkish, or admit the US is on the verge of a recession and admit policy error.

Just as we warned, not only is it time to panic but the panic is 'contagion'-ing over into the sovereign risk market. European banks are in freefall, down over 4.3% broadly, crashing to 2012's "whatever it takes" lows.

European bank risk has gone vertical... Today's spike is the largest since April 2010

TBTF banks are all seeing credit risk explode - to 52-week highs and beyond...

Slamming European bank stocks back to near "whatever it takes" lows...

While the ongoing slaughter in European bank credit, and mostly counterparty risk, is troubling, it is nothing new: we have been showing it for over a month, most recently on Friday in "European Bank Risk Soars To 3 Year Highs, US Risk Rising."

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For the first time since 2012, Bafin - Germany’s banking regulator, which for a minute looked like it might actually accuse Anshu Jain of lying about LIBOR - has closed a bank.

All financial transactions by Maple Bank of Canada’s German subsidiary have been halted on the grounds the operation has too much debt or, as BaFin put it, there’s “a prohibition on transfer of ownership and payment, due to imminent over indebtedness.”