general elections

In an incident that is oddly reminiscent to the "failed coup" in Turkey from last June, late on Tuesday a rogue Venezuelan police helicopter strafed the Supreme Court and the interior ministry on Tuesday, in what President Nicolas Maduro called an attack by "terrorists seeking a coup" and which major news agencies said was an escalation of the OPEC nation's political crisis, although to some local Venezuelans this was a staged attempt to justify ongoing repression at Venezuela's National Assembly.

In the aftermath of the stunning loss by Theresa May's Conservative party in the UK General Elections, bookmakers quickly made Labour's Jeremy Corbin the odds-on favorite to become the UK's next Prime Minister, implying May would resign shortly. That contingency, however, got a last minute reprieve when May announced on Friday she would seek to form a minority government with the help of a small Northern Irish party, the far-right Democratic Unionist Party (DUP), extending her political career if only for the immediate future.

Not everyone is satisfied with today's news that Italy's early elections will likely be pushed back. Italy's anti-establishment 5-Star Movement called on Thursday for immediate national elections after the previously reported deal on electoral reform - which would have resulted in the next Italian elections taking place in September, at the same time as Germany's - among the major parties unraveled.

So far "Triple Threat Thursday" has been a dud. In the day with the greatest concentration of market-moving risk events so far in 2017, market action - at least for the time being - has been a whimper, with European stocks and US futures modestly higher ahead of the ECB’s rate decision and Comey's testimony (which has now been fully publicized, removing much of the risk), as the U.K. voting is underway. Asian stocks fell led by a decline in Japan as the yen first strengthened, only to tumble later in the session.

Authored by Brandon Smith via Alt-Market.com,

After the Manchester suicide bombing only two weeks ago I warned my readers that the repetition of terror attacks is breeding complacency within the public, in Europe most acutely. It is not uncommon now for attacks killing dozens to be forgotten within a week of the event. The news feeds are awash in distraction, and of course, sometimes these events themselves act as distractions.

In a recent newscast of MSNBC's “Morning Joe”, BBC anchor Katty Kay stated: