United Kingdom

Despite yesterday's whopping beats by Amazon and Google which sent the Nasdaq to new record highs after hours, and brought Jeff Bezos "this close" to overtaking Bill Gates as the world's richest man, this morning futures S&P futures are little changed ahead of the closely watched Q1 GDP report, European stocks and Asian equities are slightly lower, oil is higher after Russia's energy minister Novak said Russia had reached the 300kbpd oil cut per the OPEC pact, and the dollar was modestly in the red.

Authored by Raul Ilargi Meijer via The Automatic Earth blog,

Something hit me this week. The maps which came out on Monday and detailed the outcome of the French elections, were telling a story, and a familiar one by now. A story of deep division. There are a number of such maps now depicting the Brexit vote in the UK, the US presidential elections, and its French counterpart.

It would appear that British defense minister Michael Fallon's comments that The UK could launch a preemptive nuclear strike "in the most extreme circumstances," was not an implicit threat that the deputy head of the Russian Federation Council’s Committee for Defense and Security took lightly.

In a terse Facebook posted response, Frants Klintsevich raged:

Authored by Denis MacEoin via The Gatestone Institute,

After yesterday's violent gap up in stocks across the globe in response to the "expected" outcome from the French election, today the risk on sentiment has continued if to a lesser extent, with stocks in Europe, Asia all rising while S&P futures point to a higher open. Yen, gold decline, while the euro traded as high as 1.09 this morning before fading some gains; oil is up modestly.