On Sunday, Angela Merkel suffered a bitter defeat at the ballot box in state elections that effectively served as a referendum on Berlin’s open-door migrant policy.
Exit polls showed support for the Chancellor’s CDU falling in Baden-Wuerttemberg, in Saxony-Anhalt, and in Rhineland-Palatinate versus 2011. Those results were validated as CDU lost ground versus the last election across the board.
The biggest macro development over the weekend was China's latest "gloomy" economic update, in which industrial production, retail sales and lending figures all missed estimates, however now that we are back to central bank bailout mode, bad news is once again good news, and the Shanghai Comp soared +1.7% among the best performers in Asia on calls for further central bank stimulus while the new CSRC chief also vowed to intervene in stock markets if necessary. In other words, the worse the data in China, the better.
Those algos who scrambled to paint yesterday's closing tape with that last second VIX slam sending the S&P back over 2,000, forgot one thing - the same thing that China also ignored - central bankers can not print trade, something we have repeated since 2011.
By Mark Fleming-Williams of Stratfor
Europe Without the Union
In the current time of unprecedented central-planner-focused monetary-policy experimentation and a growing bias towards collectivist and socialist attitudes, the similarities to what Wilhelm Ropke - the European economist who stood up to Hitler - had some seemingly ominous and prescient persepctives in 1933 before everything collapsed: