Germany

Despite the Fed continuing to kick this down the road, they continue to claim that we are in the middle of an ongoing recovery. There’s just one problem with that: things are getting worse than pre-crisis levels for millions of the poorest Americans. Possibly even more concerning is the fact that the amount of Americans living below the poverty line has soared since 2007.

"In my opinion, provision of military support to illegal structures runs counter to the principles of modern international law and the United Nations Charter."

Neoliberal economics is blind to reality and serves to justify the destruction of the economic prospects of the Western World. It remains to be seen if Russia and China can develop a different economics or whether these rising superpowers will fall victim to the “junk economics” that has destroyed the West. With so many Chinese and Russian economists educated in the US tradition, the prospects of Russia and China might not be any better than ours. The entire world could go down the tubes together.

After borrowing (and largely wasting) $15 trillion during the Great Recession, China now looks like a typical decadent developed-world country, complete with slow growth, anemic consumer spending and unstable financial markets. But it’s not France, Canada or the US, where recessions happen and voters peacefully replace one major party with the other. China, within living memory, has seen civil unrest beget open rebellion beget multi-decade civil war. Take a surplus of young men (the result of China’s one-child policy which put a premium on male children), combine it with a shortage of good jobs, and the obvious result is instability.

In considering NIRP, Central bankers are failing to address an even greater potential problem, which could easily become cataclysmic. By forcing people into paying to maintain cash and bank deposits, central bankers are playing fast-and-loose with the public’s patient acceptance that state-issued money actually has any value at all. There is a tension between this cavalier macroeconomic attitude and what amounts to a prospective tax on personal liquidity. Furthermore, NIRP makes the hidden tax of monetary inflation, of which the public is generally unaware, suddenly very visible. We should be in no doubt that increasing public awareness of the true cost to ordinary people of monetary policies, by way of the debate that would be created by the introduction of NIRP, could have very dangerous consequences for the currency.

"The influx of migrants is not going to abate. We want to stop people crossing."

When will the “nothing is happening” crowd finally wake up?

The market, which clearly ignored the glaring contradictions in Yellen's speech which said that overseas events should not affect the Fed's policy path just a week after the Fed statement admitted it is "monitoring developments abroad", and also ignored Yellen explicit hint that NIRP is coming (only the size is unclear), and focused on the one thing it wanted to hear: a call to buy the all-critical USDJPY carry pair - because more dollar strength apparently is what the revenue and earnings recessioning S&P500 needs - which after trading around 120 in the past few days, had a 100 pip breakout overnight, hitting 121 just around 5am, in the process pushing US equity futures some 25 points higher at last check.

The outlook for diesel looks grim after U.S. regulators found that the world’s second biggest car manufacturer cheated on its emission tests. Now that diesel is not as clean as it appeared (with stricter emissions tests and perhaps even stricter regulation to be expected), one has to ask; does this mean the end of diesel for light vehicles? This is not just alarming for the automotive industry, but could also lead to a structural demand shift in fuel products. That shift could not have come at a worse time for diesel.

Martin Winterkorn, engulfed by a diesel-emissions scandal at Volkswagen AG, amassed a $32 million pension before stepping down Wednesday, and may reap millions more in severance depending on how the supervisory board classifies his exit.

Palladium surged 6% yesterday. The move appeared to be a short squeeze and may be the precursor for the long awaited move higher in gold and silver.

With the new car bubble peaking, and the world's automakers having ramped up production across the globe after seeing Fed-driven signals that all is well and all is going to get better, the slowdown in China already has many hitting the panic button (with production plunging, capacity utilization tumbling, and workweeks tumbling). With this week's 'exogenous' diesel-defect 'event', the inventory-problem that US automakers are facing is nothing compared to the potentially catacylysmic wave of deflationary pricing (and deflationary lack of demand for raw materials) that VW faces with its record inventory.

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And just like that Weimar 2.0 is born.