Europe

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.

The head of Germany’s domestic intelligence agency (BfV) has said that ISIS militants may have slipped into Europe disguised as refugees.  Hans-Georg Maasse says that the Paris terror attacks last November proves that ISIS are capable of planting terrorist in Europe, and has warned that there are many more that are yet to be discovered. Reuters.com reports: “Then we have repeatedly seen that terrorists … have slipped in camouflaged or disguised as refugees. This is a fact that the security agencies are facing,” Maassen told ZDF television.

Submitted by Douglas Murray via The Gatestone Institute,

• Facebook is now removing speech that presumably almost everybody might decide is racist -- along with speech that only someone at Facebook decides is "racist."