presidential election

As recently as one week ago, French conservative politician Francois Fillon, who until recently was the favorite to win the upcoming presidential election until centrist Emmanuel Macron stormed ahead of him in popularity, said he would end his presidential campaign if an official probe was launched against him over a long-running graft scandal. Then, one week ago, he backtracked on the promise to quit the race if he is placed under formal investigation over his wife’s employment.

After nearly a week of eerie silence in which Trump ignored the topic of "leaks" to the press by various US agencies, most notably the FBI, in his first tweets of the day the president reverted to one of his biggest peeves in recent weeks, namely how the "enemy" press continues to get inside scoops into his administration, and tore into the Federal Bureau of Investigations, following a provocative report from CNN which cited "unnamed sources" according to whom the White House tried to urge the FBI to dispute accounts of regular contact between the Trump 2016 presidential campaign and Russia

The near-record string of 10 consecutive Dow Industrials record highs, a streak not seen since early 1987, may be about to end if futures, which are currently trading -0.3% lower, fail to stage a rebound.

As French voters look set to make a massive swing to the right in their upcoming presidential election (see our notes on the topic here and here), a group of frightened liberal protesters have decided to back a relatively surprising, if impossible, presidential candidate in 2017, Barack Obama. 

And, lest you thing this is a joke, a quick walk around Paris even reveals campaign posters for "Obama17" plastered all around the city.

As we previously noted, while speculatrs had been reducing their shorts in Treasury futures, they had added to Eurodollar shorts - pushing their bets on Fed rate hikes to record highs. However, as Bloomberg notes, signals are starting to emerge that traders who built up that heavy short, or hawkish, eurodollar base since the start of 2016 could be starting to throw in the towel on a March Fed rate hike.