A Russian Ministry of Defense report states that America have conceded their total defeat in Afghanistan within hours of holding peace talks with the Taliban in the Pakistani capital city of Islamabad. At the same time the West have expressed concern that Russia’s ongoing defeat of ISIS in Syria is likely to have a huge impact on U.S.
Over one year ago, when the "conventional wisdom" punditry was dreaming up scenarios in which the Fed could somehow hike rates to 3% and in some magical world where cause and effect are flipped, push the economy to grow at a comparable rate we said that not only is the Fed's tightening plan going to be aborted as it represents "policy error" and tightening in the middle of a global recession, but it will result in the Fed ultimately cutting rates back to zero and then, to negative.
Having long mocked the sheer idiocy of using organic cash or worse, debt proceeds, to fund buybacks just so management can eek out a few more million in equity-linked compensation while activists enjoy a few extra points in P&L on the back of naive bondholders managing 'other people's money', we were delighted to see the buyback bubble begin to burst in the middle of 2015 starting with Michael Kors (as detailed in "When Stock Buybacks Go Horribly Wrong") and Monsanto ("When Buybacks Fail..."), when each respective stock plunged far below the average buyback price.
Europe’s worsening migrant crisis is the best thing that ever happened to the PEGIDA movement.
The group very nearly faded into obscurity early last year after then-leader Lutz Bachmann posted a picture of himself dressed as Hitler on Facebook with the caption “He’s back.”
Then, 1.1 million Mid-East asylum seekers flooded across Germany’s borders.
Ten days ago, when Deutsche Bank stock was about 10% higher, the biggest German commercial bank declared war on Mario Draghi, as we put it, warning him that any further easing by the ECB would only push stocks (with an emphasis on DB stock which has gotten pummeled over the past few months) lower. What it got, instead, was a slap in the face in the form of a major new easing program when the Bank of Japan announced it is unveiling negative rates just three days later.