Greece

News That Matters

The US has now joined Canada, Cyprus, New Zealand, the UK, and Germany with plans to seize bank accounts during the next financial crisis. 

"As you know, the environment for global macro fundamentals-based trading continues to be challenging. That factor, combined with the lack of certainty over when a recovery will take hold, led us to conclude that the time was right to return capital to you."

But what’s different this time?

Following Friday's disastrous payrolls report, which confirmed all the pre-recessionary economic data and signaled that instead of approaching "lift-off" and decoupling from the rest of the world, the US economy is following the emerging markets into a slowdown in what may be the first global, synchronized recession since 2008, the market saw its biggest intraday surge since 2011 and the sharpest short covering squeeze in history, we are happy to announce that the "market" is now solidly back in "bad news is good news" mode.

The results from Portugal's elections are beginning to trickle in and according to exit polls, Coelho's coalition has prevailed. According to Bloomberg, the ruling coalition of Prime Minister Pedro Passos Coelho has won 38%-43% of vote and 108-116 seats.

Once again the reactions of desperate government policies looks like creating an even worse situation thanks to unintended (though entirely foreseeable) consequences. Amid the prospect of sharply higher shipping taxes in Greece - designed to increase revenues and 'fix' the debt-ridden nation, WSJ reports many of Greece’s world-leading shipowners are actively exploring options to leave their home country. With Greece controlling 20% of the world's shipping fleet, the 'quadriga' of Greek creditors' demands to raise taxes (because debt restructuring is out of the question) on such an 'easy target' as the world's largest shipping industry appears likely to backfire as an entire industry's revenues move out of reach of government taxers.

Moves will be made to ban physical cash in the coming months.

News That Matters

Good news! Bad news is again great for stocks, and overnight we had just the right amount of bad news from Japan, China and Europe to send stocks surging on the first day of the final quarter.

"Germany's domestic intelligence chief warned on Sunday of a radicalisation of Right-wing groups amid a record influx of migrants, as xenophobic rallies and clashes shook several towns at the weekend."

Whether it’s the economy, climate, the planet, warfare, your future obligations, your pensions, the future of your children, nobody in power tells you the truth. Human life is fast losing the value we would like to tell ourselves we assign to it. We don’t, do we? Our technological advances haven’t come with moral advances, quite the contrary, our morals turn out to be a thin layer of mere cheap veneer. What advances we’re making are the last death rattle of a society in decline, and a dying civilization.

The exodus from war-torn Syria should never have become a crisis, according to billionaire George Soros; it was long in the making, easy to foresee, and eminently manageable by Europe and the international community. While some leaders, like Hungary's Orban, have suggested plans, these subordinate the human rights of asylum-seekers and migrants and threaten to divide and destroy the EU by renouncing the values on which it was built and violating the laws that are supposed to govern it. Soros demands that The EU respond with a genuinely European asylum policy that will put an end to the panic and the unnecessary human suffering.

CATALAN SEPARATISTS CLOSE TO 50% OF VOTES: EXIT POLL

The divergence theme is likely to strengthen in the week ahead.