presidential election

Today's sudden 'Minsky Moment' in markets has pushed US equity risk perceptions to their highest relative to Europe since August 2015, back to old 'norms'.

As Bloomberg notes, U.S. politics are taking center stage as risks recede in Europe following the French presidential election. With Donald Trump facing the deepest crisis of his presidency, the CBOE Volatility Index surged on Wednesday, while Europe’s VStoxx Index rose less than 5 percent.

A few hours before the Comey memo news broke, we posted "Height Securities Begins Contemplating "Impeachment": Here's What To Look For", and as expected, starkly adverse news such as this was one of the catalysts.

Predictably it did not take long after the NYT story hit, for impeachment calls to hit a crescendo. First it was CNN's Wolf Blitzer who brought up the possibility of impeaching President Trump in an interview with Independent Senator Angus King.

For the past several months, Democrats have based their "Resist 45" movement on unsubstantiated assertions that the Trump campaign coordinated with Russian intelligence officials to undermine the 2016 Presidential Election thereby 'stealing' the White House from Hillary Clinton.  Day after day we've all suffered through one anonymously sourced, "shock" story after another from the New York Times and/or The Washington Post with new allegations of the 'wrongdoing'.

In its first bond sale since the presidential election and the first big test of investor sentiment after Emmanuel Macron won the presidency, France received more than €31 billion in demand for a 30-year bond offering, once again demonstarting the unprecedented demand for duration on the yield-starved continent where the ECB is happily gobbling up every interest-yielding instrument. With some €7 billion in ultra-long duration paper sold via a syndicate of banks, pricing at 30Y FRTR +12, tighter than the +14 price talk, the issue was more than 4 times oversubscribed.

Authored by Mike Krieger via Liberty Blitzkrieg blog,

Before we get into the meat of this post, it’s important to refresh our memories on what the unmasking scandal is and why it’s important. In order to do that, let’s revisit excerpts from last month’s post, If What Susan Rice Did Wasn’t Illegal, It Should Be:

U.S. citizens who are caught up incidentally in foreign intelligence surveillance are typically subject to minimization rules to conceal their identities, though there are some exceptions.