South Korea

S&P futures are flat, still spooked by the WSJ's report that Gary Cohn will not be the next Fed chair, while both European stocks and Asian shares gain in a overnight session on edge in which everyone is looking forward to today's main risk event: the ECB meeting and Draghi press conference due in under two hours. The dollar continued to weaken against most G-10 peers as tensions over North Korea, concerns over Stan Fischer's resignation and the increasingly cloudy Fed outlook outweighed positive sentiment from the US debt ceiling extension.

Submitted by Stock Board Asset

South Koreans clashed with police ahead of the deployment of four more Terminal High Altitude Area Defense (THAAD) systems in southern South Korea. Per Yonhapnews, the clash occurred as police were trying to disperse about 400 residents from their community center near the U.S. missile defense base in Seongju, some 300 kilometers south of Seoul. 

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

By setting off a 100-kiloton bomb, after firing a missile over Japan, Kim Jong Un has gotten the world’s attention.

What else does he want?

Almost surely not war with America. For no matter what damage Kim could visit on U.S. troops and bases in South Korea, Okinawa and Guam, his country would be destroyed and the regime his grandfather built annihilated.

As part of South Korea’s response to the latest escalations out of its northern neighbor, the country's defense minister on Monday said it was "worth reviewing the redeployment of American tactical nuclear weapons to the Korean Peninsula" to guard against the North, a step that analysts warn would sharply increase the risk of an accidental conflict. On Monday, South Korean Defense Minister Song Young-moo said that he asked his American counterpart, Jim Mattis, during talks at the Pentagon last week that strategic assets such as  U.S.

It won't be the first time that a near-panicked Japan has came close to the edge when it comes to North Korea, and in preparation for an "emergency" was planning to evacuate its citizens located in South Korea. The last such notable spike in escalations took place in April, when as the Yomiuri Shimbun reported at the time, the Japanese government had asked the U.S.