Europe

The U.S. Ambassador to the Soviet Union at the time it broke up and many other experts have said that the West promised Gorbachev that – if the USSR allowed German re-unification – NATO wouldn’t move “one inch closer” to Russia.

While Western leaders have long denied that such a promise, newly-declassified documents now prove this.

The National Security Archive at George Washington University reported Tuesday:

For almost 7 years, asset-gatherers and commission-takers have exclaimed "There Is No Alternative" to stocks, given how low interest rates are. However, given the recent buying-panic in stocks, TINA is now dead BAB is back (Bonds Are Better)...

In a sign the U.S. equity rally may be looking stretched, Bloomberg notes that the forward dividend yield on the S&P 500 has dropped below the return on Treasuries for the first time since 2011.

We said two days ago that it’s been a tough week for anybody who needs to heat their home or put gasoline in their cars in Britain. The litany of negative events and mishaps includes extremely low temperatures, the shutdown of the Forties pipeline due to a hairline crack and an explosion at one of the Europe’s biggest gas hubs in Austria, which further tightened UK supplies.

As we noted, the price of gas futures surged by the most in 8 years. The timing of the gas hub explosion, as we head into Winter, couldn’t have been worse either.

One day after the Fed hiked rates by 25 bps as part of Janet Yellen's final news conference, it is central bank bonanza day, with rate decisions coming from the rest of the world's most important central banks, including the ECB, BOE, SNB, Norges Bank, HKMA, Turkey and others.

Does Germany owe Greeks billions of euros in World War II reparations for the damages and the enforced loan during the occupation of the country by the Nazis? So far, Berlin has vehemently rejected any Greek claims.

However, as Keep Talking Greece reports, two German researchers, who dug into the documents of the dispute, have discovered and calculated that the German state owes Greece 185 billion euros.

Of this not even a 1% has been paid to Greece.