Politics

While Angela Merkel is busy sowing the seeds of the next cold war between Germany and the Trump administration (and therefore the US, if only for the next three and a half years), a troubling flashpoint for Germany continues to grow in Turkey where on Tursday, Turkey's foreign minister said it is not possible to allow German lawmakers to visit troops stationed at Turkey's Incirlik air base now, although he said Ankara may reconsider if it sees "positive steps" from Berlin.

The Mexican peso tumbled more than 1% this morning, more than every other major emerging-market currency except the South African rand.

Bloomberg reports that traders were anticipating a victory for the opposition Morena party in this weekend’s gubernatorial elections in the state of Mexico, according to Win Thin, Brown Brothers Harriman & Co.’s head of emerging markets in New York.

And the peso is back at one-week lows

Seemingly dredging up old 'fake' news as new bombshells, CNN reports that Russian government officials reportedly talked about having possibly "derogatory" information about President Trump and some of his top aides during the 2016 presidential race.

As The Hill details, the officials' discussions were intercepted by U.S. intelligence, CNN reported, citing two former intelligence officials and a congressional source.

A source told CNN the information was related to finances.

 

In late April, the Venezuela opposition slammed attempts by the Maduro regime to liquidate some/all of the nation's gold in order to buy his crumbling regime some additional time with much needed liquidity.

For all the criticism of Trump's first foreign trip, he seems to have achieved something quite unprecedented: he has united Germany's political parties in a common fury (to avoid using a harsher word) aimed squarely at the US president.