European Central Bank

Following yesterday's OPEC "production freeze" meeting in Doha which ended in total failure, where in a seemingly last minute change of heart Saudi Arabia and specifically its deputy crown prince bin Salman revised the terms of the agreement demanding Iran participate in the freeze after all knowing well it won't, oil crashed and with it so did the strategy of jawboning for the past 2 months had been exposed for what it was: a desperate attempt to keep oil prices stable and "crush shorts" while global demand slowly picked up.

Via NorthmanTrader.com,

Following this weekend's snafu in which Spiegel said that Germany is considering suing the ECB if it launched QE, Mario Draghi reportedly made attempts to "mollify" Germany with promises that this won't happen (it will) and that it was willing to meet - literally - with the German finance minister to appease any concerns he may have. Moments ago, Reuters reports that the meeting appears to have gone... badly.

As we predicted last week when Wikileaks released an IMF transcript which suggested trubulent times may be ahead for Greece, Reuters today writes that "the leaking of a conference call of International Monetary Fund officials on Greece's latest bailout review has further undermined mutual trust in fraught debt talks, embarrassed the European Commission and infuriated the IMF and Germany."

One month ago, when Mario Draghi unveiled his quadruple-bazooka QE expansion, which for the first time ever included the monetization of corporate bonds, the German press, in this case Handelsblatt, had a swift reaction. It did not approve.