Europe

According to Morgan Stanley's European equity strategist, Graham Secker, we may have just hit peak bearishness. However, does that mean that a rebound in risk sentiment is imminent, or is this just the beginning of a multi-decade mean reversion, one that will seek to unwind years of central bank intervention, and push risk assets to their ex-central bank prop fair values?

We don't the answer just yet, although it seems unlikely that after one humiliating episode in recent months for the ECB, Fed and BOJ, each, they will simply pack up and go.

The earnings season has started, and several major banks in the Eurozone have already reported on how they performed in the fourth quarter of 2015, and the entire financial year. Most results were quite boring, but unfortunately Deutsche Bank once again had some bad news.

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.