general election

With traders realizing that the "Thursday Turmoil Trifecta" looms, world stocks dropped and safe-haven assets rose as investors focused on the growing tension in the Middle East, while caution spread across markets in a week full of risk events including James Comey’s congressional testimony to the ECB’s policy meeting and Britain’s increasingly uncertain election, all in the span of 24 hours. As a result, European and Asian stocks as well as S&P futures all fell, while gold, yen and Treasuries gained.

It was just over a week ago that the WSJ reported that upon Trump's return from his first international trip, White House lawyers may force the president to finally put away his cell phone, and revoke his twitter privileges.

Having learned its lesson that both an "unexpected" result (in the case of Brexit and Trump), and a "priced in", favorable election outcome both lead to higher risk prices, the market no longer even pretends to be nervous about the outcome of this Thursday's general election in the UK.

This week will be all about rhe "Thursday Turmoil Trifecta" when the UK general election will be highlight of a busy week together with the ECB monetary policy meeting, while rounding off events in the US will be James Comey's first public testimony since he was fired by Donald Trump in which he is expected to testify that Trump pressured him to end the Russian probe into Mike Flynn.

S&P futures point to a slightly lower open ahead of today's US non-mfg ISM and Service PMI data. European shares fall, while Asian shares are little changed. Several European countries, including Germany, are closed for Whit Monday leading to subdued trading. Crude futures have reversed overnight gains following the latest unexpected Gulf Crisis overnight, in which Gulf nations cut all diplomatic relations with Qatar amid striking allegations of funding terrorism, as reported overnight.