Zurich

• Gold Plunges to Lowest Since 2010 (BBG)
• In Greek crisis, one big unhappy EU family (Reuters)
• Greek Banks Reopen Their Doors (WSJ)
• Greek reshuffle hints at autumn election (FT)
• Angela Merkel signals conditions for Greek debt talks (FT)
• Dollar hits three-month high on rate view, pans gold (Reuters)
• History Shows Iran Could Surprise the Oil Market (BBG)
• ‘Charlie Hebdo’ Will Cease Publishing Cartoons of Prophet Muhammad (Newsweek)

A rumour has been making its way around the blogosphere suggesting that gold coins are not available for purchase from retail outlets across Europe. This information is misleading and incorrect.

Goldman Sachs proposes that society should bend to the needs of the financial and monetary system rather than reform of that system. At any rate, the proposals put forward by them are unlikely to achieve any kind of long-term solution to the problem of massive unsustainable debt faced by the western world and Japan. 

The ‘war’ word is being increasingly heard internationally as the U.S., EU, Russia and China adopt provocative postures over various disputes including Ukraine and in the Pacific. War with the U.S. is “inevitable” if the U.S. involves itself in the dispute which has arisen over the Spratley Islands in the South China Sea according to China's state controlled newspaper the Global Times.

Switzerland is set to open its first Bitcoin bank, multiple sources tell Handelszeitung. Meanwhile, Xapo, the self-appointed "Fort Knox" of the crypto currency world, is relocating from Silicon Valley to Zurich.

That FIFA has been a hotbed of corruption, shady backroom dealings and outright crime for years, has been known to anyone who has a passing interest in football. Which is why we were surprised to learn this morning that none other than the US Attorney General, seemingly content with all the wristslaps handed out to criminal US foreign banks (and subsequent SEC waivers) gave FIFA the red card in a charge detailing "rampant" corruption in international soccer hours after 14 officials were arrested on accusations of a 24-year scheme to enrich themselves through FIFA, whose office was searched in a series of dawn raids in Zurich.

"The price of it swings, but on the other hand it is a 100 percent guarantee from legal and political risks." - Dmitry Tulin, manager of Russia's monetary policy.

London’s property market is still hell bent on going crazy as if it has overeaten and become over inflated yet again.

Less than a week ago, fresh from the aftermath of the recent dramatic six-sigma move in German Bunds, one of Europe's largest banks openly lamented that so far the ECB's QE had done absolutely nothing: "two months of QE for nothing." And lo and behold, as if on demand, overnight the ECB confirmed it had heard SocGen's lament when just before the European market open, ECB executive board member Benoit Coeure delivered a speech at the Brevan Howard Centre for Financial Analysis (appropriately named after a hedge fund) at Imperial College Business School (not to be confused with the July 26, 2012 Mario Draghi "whatever it takes" speech which also took place in London) in which he said that the ECB intends to "frontload" i.e., increase, its purchases of euro-area assets in May and June ahead of an expected low-liquidity period in the summer.

The Economist is a quintessential establishment publication. Keynesian shibboleths about “market failure” and the need to prevent it, as well as the alleged need for governments to provide “public goods” and to steer the economy in directions desired by the ruling elite with a variety of taxation and spending schemes as well as monetary interventionism, are dripping from its pages in generous dollops.  The magazine has one of the very best records as a contrary indicator whenever it comments on markets. While gold hasn’t yet made it to the front page, but the Economist has sacrificed some ink in order to declare it “dead” (or rather, “buried”).

With NIRP having turned traditional risk-free assets into guaranteed losers, investors have poured more than $9 billion into junk bond ETFs YTD, and while common sense dictates that buying at the top of an epic HY bubble just ahead of a rate hike cycle and against a backdrop characterized by disappearing liquidity in the secondary market for corporate credit is a fool's errand, most investors feel they have little choice. 

While sentiment towards gold in the West is abysmal - even as gold languishes at record lows when adjusted for inflation - Asian demand remains insatiable. It would be wise for investors to inform themselves as to why this should be so. Demand for gold in Asia is often written off by Westerners as an irrational impulse of uneducated Asian peasant farmers and workers. 

It is undoubtedly a huge red flag when in one of the countries considered to be a member of the “highest economic freedom in the world” club, commercial banks are suddenly refusing their customers access to their cash. This money doesn’t belong to the banks, and it doesn’t belong to the central bank either. If this can happen in prosperous Switzerland, based on some nebulous notion of the “collective good”, which its unelected central planners can arbitrarily determine and base decisions upon, it can probably happen anywhere. Consider yourself warned.

Following comments from the Swiss National Bank, reducing the group of sight deposit account holders that are exempt from negative interest rates, has sent Swissy tumbling...

If yesterday stocks surged on the worst 4-month stretch of missing retail sales since Lehman, one which BofA with all seriousness spun by saying "it seems not unreasonable to suspect that the March 2015 reading on retail sales gets revised up next month", then the reason why futures are now solidly in the green across the board even as German Bunds have just 14 bps to go until they hit negative yields and before the ECB is fresh out of luck on future debt monetization, is that overnight China reported its worst GDP since 2009 together with economic data misses across the board confirming China's economy continues its hard landing approach despite a stock market that has doubled in the past year.