Europe

"Putin Uses The Refugee Crisis To Weaken Merkel", by Judy Dempsey as originally published at Carnegie Europe,

Back in December 2015, when it became clear that refugees from the Middle East would continue to head toward Germany, Chancellor Angela Merkel reassured her conservative Christian Democratic Union party that everything was under control. All she needed, she told party members, was more time. Germany could manage the influx of over 1 million refugees and asylum seekers.

Earlier this month, Kyle Bass asked a funny question in a discussion with CNBC’s David Faber. To wit: “If some fund manager in Texas is saying that your currency is dramatically overvalued, you shouldn’t care on a $10 trillion economy with $34 trillion in your banks. I have, call it a billion -  it’s so small it should be irrelevant and yet somehow it’s really relevant.”

Submitted by Erico Matias Tavares via Sinclair & Co.,

William R. White is the chairman of the Economic and Development Review Committee at the OECD in Paris. Prior to that, Dr. White held a number of senior positions with the Bank for International Settlements (“BIS”), including Head of the Monetary and Economic Department, where he had overall responsibility for the department's output of research, data and information services, and was a member of the Executive Committee which manages the BIS. He retired from the BIS on 30 June 2008.

One thing that became abundantly clear in the wake of the financial crisis was that everything - and we do mean everything - was being manipulated by Wall Street’s biggest and most systemically important financial institutions.

First we learned that the most important benchmark rate on the planet was nothing more than a tool submitters used to inflate the value of their traders’ books, something we flagged way back in 2009.

Submitted by Christoph Gisiger via Finanz Und Wirtschaft,

Fred Hickey, editor of the widely read investment newsletter «The High-Tech Strategist», warns of more trouble to come for stocks and spots bright investment opportunities in the gold sector.