For the first time since 2012, Bafin - Germany’s banking regulator, which for a minute looked like it might actually accuse Anshu Jain of lying about LIBOR - has closed a bank.
All financial transactions by Maple Bank of Canada’s German subsidiary have been halted on the grounds the operation has too much debt or, as BaFin put it, there’s “a prohibition on transfer of ownership and payment, due to imminent over indebtedness.”
The biggest event of the weekend, if not the month, was China's FX reserve outflow update, which at $100BN was slightly better than the $120BN expected (it pushed China's reserves to the lowest in nearly 4 years) but it was in the "no man's land" between the BofA best case scenario ($37.5BN), and the GS worst case ($197BN).
Late last month, we reported that Austria may cut social benefits for asylum seekers who fail to attend “special integration training courses” and more specifically, for refugees who don’t make an honest effort to learn German.
“Those who are not willing to learn German, who do not want to be part of the labor market, who are not ready to attend an integration course, will face social benefits cuts,” Foreign Minister Sebastian Kurz said in Davos.
It was just two days ago that Bloomberg implored officials to “bring on a cashless future” in an Op-Ed that calls notes and coins “dirty, dangerous, unwieldy, and expensive.”
You probably never thought of your cash that way, but increasingly, authorities and the powers that be seem determined to lay the groundwork for the abolition of what Bloomberg calls “antiquated” physical money.
A retired broadcaster who ran one of Germany’s major television networks has gone on-air and admitted that his network and others take orders from the government on what they can and can’t report. Breitbart.com reports: National public service broadcaster Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen (ZDF), which was recently forced into a humiliating apology for their silence on migrant violence and sex assault is being drawn into a fresh scandal after one of their former bureau chiefs admitted the company takes orders from the government on what it reports.