Eurozone

For those wondering what comes to mind for the average Chinese web surfer with regard to nations in Europe, we present the following map from Foreign Policy who “plotted the most common Chinese-language Baidu query for each European nation.” Highlights include "likes to fight" for Russia, "why doesn't it annex Portugal" for Spain, and "beautiful women" for Ukraine.

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"If, as seems possible, the ECB will increase, in H1 2016, the scale of its monthly asset purchases from €60bn to, say, €75bn, and if these additional purchases are concentrated on public debt, the euro area will benefit from a ‘backdoor’ helicopter money drop –something long overdue."

Speaking to Slovak news agency TASR on December 15h, President Milos Zeman said that he was "extremely disappointed that the summer negotiations between Greece and creditors did not ultimately lead to Greece’s exit from the euro area, although it looked quite possible." Greece had an immediate response: it recalled its ambassador to Prague. 

“To the intelligent man or woman, life appears infinitely mysterious, but the stupid have an answer for everything.” ~Edward Abbey

"The solution to uncertainty is cheaper valuations. If problems are priced in, investors can afford to look through near terms concerns and focus on the longer term. Worryingly, we have exactly the opposite situation today. Average stock valuations are close to historical highs – so we have lots of risk and little in the way of valuation cushion.... Time for a US rate rise then?"

"In short, the age of unconventional monetary policy begun by the 2007-09 financial crisis might not be ending."

- Jon Hilsenrath

"The move would arguably represent the biggest transfer of sovereignty since the creation of the single currency."

"2015 was like commuting by rollercoaster. There were heart-stopping drops, there were nearly vertical ascents, and when it was all over you got off just about where you started and it cost you money."

“I don’t think we’ve seen the last of this trend. When I trained as an economist, negative rates weren’t in the textbooks. But that’s the world we live in now, and it hasn’t stopped turning."

"There are $1.1 trillion of S&P 500 options expiring on Friday morning. $670Bn of these are puts, of which $215Bn are struck relatively close below the market level, between 1900 and 2050. At the time of the Fed announcement, these put options will essentially look like a massive stop loss order under the market. This important event falls at a peculiar time—less than 48 hours before the largest option expiry in many years. "