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As the head of Russian gas giant Gazprom, Alexei Miller, arrives in Athens tomorrow (for talks with Greek PM Tsipras about "current energy issues of interest," which we suspect will include finalizing the "Turkish Stream" pipeline heralded by many as Greece's potential get-out-of-Troika-jail-card), he will face an increasingly anxious European Union. Fresh from its suit against Google, the WSJ reports, the EU's competition regulator plans to file formal antitrust charges against Russia’s state-owned gas company OAO Gazprom on Wednesday. This re-opens a suit from 2012 saying that it suspected the company of abusing its dominant position in those countries’ natural-gas supply. It appears Europe is getting nervous...

Just as very few realize the dollar and the euro are digital currencies, very few realize that those dollars and euros that they own quite possibly being hacked right now. Here's how easy it is to do so...

While this week sees the peak of Q1 earnings season, it will be a generally quiet week on the macro economic front for both EM and DM, with the emphasis on the latest seasonally adjusted manufacturing sentiment surveys, US durables and Japan trade.

It is only fitting that the next business day following a headline that "Global Futures Slide China Tumbles On Short Selling Boost" we would see China, in an apparent panic, not only cut its RRR by 100 bps to 18.5% - far more than expected and the most since 2008 - but, more importantly, hinted that the Friday regulatory decision to encourage short sales and tighter margin rules on "umbrella trusts" was in no way meant to pop that the Chinese stock bubble, ridiculous as it may be. End result: after Chinese futures crashed by up to 6% on Friday after the Shanghai close, overnight the SHCOMP was down just 1.64%, erasing the bulk of the futures loss. More importantly, US equity futures have seen a strong bid this morning in yet another attempt to defend not only the Apple Sachs Industrial Average from going red on the year but the all important 100 DMA technical levels.

Good thing Goldman didn't take me upon that leveraged macro trade yesterday. The GS short leg was up ~50% as I type this post. More concerning than my catching their increase in risk/leverage is the method in which I did the trade. Broker-dealers are no longer needed, and Goldman is a broker-dealer.

• Fed Shies Away From June Rate Hike (Hilsenrath)
• Europe Stocks Fall Most in Three Weeks Amid Greece as Banks Drop (BBG)
• China Futures Tumble on Trust Curbs, Expansion of Short Selling (BBG)
• Oil slips below $64 as ample supplies weigh (Reuters)
• Fed officials lean all ways on rate hikes, data in focus (Reuters)
• Eurozone deflation eases in March (FT)

As noted earlier, while tens of thousands of Bloomberg terminal users were twiddling their thumbs during an outage that lasted several hours, China crashed.  There was some confusion about the cause of the rapid move, but it appears the catalyst was an announcement by the China Securities Regulatory Commission in which it allowed fund managers to lend shares for short-selling, and will also expand the number of stocks investors can short sell, in a bid to raise the supply of securities in the market.

The American people remain eager to be persuaded that a new president in the White House can solve the problems that plague us. Yet no matter who wins this next presidential election, you can rest assured that the new boss will be the same as the old boss, and we - the permanent underclass in America - will continue to be forced to march in lockstep with the police state in all matters, public and private. It really doesn’t matter what you call them - the 1%, the elite, the controllers, the masterminds, the shadow government, the police state, the surveillance state, the military industrial complex - so long as you understand that no matter which party occupies the White House in 2017, the unelected bureaucracy that actually calls the shots will continue to do so.

As we reported earlier, the former chief of the IMF Rodrigo Rato, who was succeeded in 2007 by another scandalous figure, Dominique Strauss-Khan, was recently put under investigation by Spanish authorities for money-laundering, benefiting from a tax amnesty to repatriate previously undeclared offshore funds. This is in addition to previous investigation into his role as chairman of Caja Madrid, the failed savings bank, and its successor Bankia. And, unlike every single JPM banker pretty much ever, moments ago Rato became the second former IMF head in several years (following DSK), to be placed under arrest.

Surprise! Surprise! Five years ago I said the only way Goldman would ever break $200 again was to ratchet up risk. Guess who broke $200 this morning. Better yet, guess how they did it! Every financial rag and business blog should read this BEFORE writing another word about GS blowout earnings!

It has become conventional wisdom that the wave of the future is “smart home” technology from smart utility meters that read a houses energy usage automatically to smart lights that turn off when not in use. Smart home technology marries two of the most talked about trends in business right now – the internet of things and green technology. How useful are smart home devices really though? A recent report by the British government suggests that the smart home revolution may be starting to hit some bumps in the road.

Conformity and being able to navigate stifling bureaucracies no longer creates value or helps employers solve real-world problems. This is why college graduates can send out hundreds of resumes and not even receive a single reply, much less an interview or job offer. An entire new feedback loop of accreditation is needed...

• Euro zone bond yields sink to historic lows (Reuters)
• Clinton Foundation to Keep Foreign Donors (WSJ)
• Russia says U.S. forced it to act on Ukraine (Reuters)
• Bankers to China's Rescue (BBG)
• Saudi Arabia Adds Half a Bakken to Global Oil Market in a Month (BBG)
• Valuations of Hong Kong's stock market operator go interstellar (Reuters)
• Switzerland Attracts Fewer Firms as Politics Hurt Business Image (BBG)

"Financial markets are treating the risks around Greek exit with too little regard for the probable dangers," UBS says. Put simply, bond yields don't matter, meaning that ECB-controlled sovereign spreads can't possibly be taken as a serious indicator when it comes to assessing the contagion risk from a possible Grexit. What matters are bank runs because to the degree depositors feel that redenomination risk is real, everything else goes out the window and the lines start to form at the doors of periphery banks.