An historic moment in world finance came to pass this morning. Today, the European Central Bank (ECB) starts to buy Eurozone corporate bonds. French banks on behalf of the ECB kicked off  the debt purchasing programme by buying the bonds of a French utility company as the European markets opened.  The result is that in order to get any decent return on their investments, funds (such as the pension funds which invest the savings of tens of millions of people across the continent) are crowded out from securing these instruments at a reasonable return.  What’s more as can be seen in this screenshot the return on government debt is now at all-time lows, so again savers worldwide are set to suffer.

The knock on effects of this unprecedented action are hard to calculate – and surely this is the key point? Yet again we see the desperation and determination of the world’s central bankers and monetary policy elite to do ‘anything it takes’ to stop the necessary Great Correction from talking place after the 2008/9 financial crisis. What is clear is what they are doing is likely to have unintended consequences that make matters worse.  Will private funds have to trade down to the junk bond market to get returns? If so these rates are likely to fall and so may not reflect their true risk.

While saving us from pain now, the actions of the BOE, ECB and the FED are ensuring that correction in the markets of many asset classes will be bigger and more damaging for ordinary working people across the EU. It will be interesting to see just what the ECB thinks constitutes ‘quality paper’ under this scheme. For example, can we expect the ECB to buy bonds in Italian, Spanish and Greek companies?  Somehow I think not. So what signal does this send to investors about the future value of these businesses in periphery Eurozone countries? Yet another unintended consequence…

This just popped up on the news wires. Ireland sells 500 million euros worth of 6 month treasury bills at a negative interest rate of MINUS -0.1%. This means that investors are happy to pay money to park their cash in Irish debt, a country that has a growing total national debt of 218.5 BILLION euros, for 6 months. How many of you out there think that this is completely NUTS! It is until you realise that the likely buyer of some of this debt is the European Central Bank (ECB) which is committed to a Quantitative Expansion (QE) programme of some 60 billion euros a month. Search for 'Ireland national debt clock' and see it ticking up. New figures published by the EU statistics office Eurostat in January this year show Irish debt now stands at 114.8% of GDP. It looks like the wizards of the world's central banks have come up with a new way to keep the wheels turning on the global economic wagon by reducing the debt burden on national governments. In addition to financing the debt themselves, the wizards create so much instability that people with savings (pension funds) buy sovereign bonds in order to get some semblance of protection against losses. Global QE is a beggar my neighbour policy that will destroy us all and when China responds to the latest moves by the US and Europe, the currency wars will take on a whole new dimension. Bring it on...

As usual with all things #EU #Eurozone if you are only a casual observer you’d likely think that the recent #EuroGroup Finance Ministers deal with #Greece has bought that indebted country a few months to get things back on track. In fact things are getting worse, as the Greek government becomes more desperate to save itself from humiliation at the hands of a hardening line from more (relatively) fiscally conservative members of the monetary area. The Greeks are reaching for extreme measures like this one that threaten non-Eurozone members like the UK. Can it get any worse than weaponising people?

I jet back in from an India biz trip, have a quick kip and show fortitude in staying up to watch my beloved New England Patriots win the SuperBowl. My love affair with the #GoPats is decades old. I went to school in Greenwich, Conn, and it was an NFL choice between the Pats or the NY Giants. For the first 20 years I thought I made the wrong choice but the last 15 has been special as Coach Belichick and QB Tom Brady have shown world class management skills in the salary cap/free agency era. Last night, we won in the last seconds because a Pat's Rookie just did his job exceedingly well!

My goodness, is it possible to sum up the future of the world in one chart? Of course, it is. Forget Ebola, food, ISIS, water, money, climate change, war, poverty and death. All of these variable are directly connected in one way or other to OIL. Yep, everything you do, love, hate or rate is affected by the availability of this black gold that higher powers have blessed the most instable countries with in abundance. [Er, surely you mean that oil is the cause of their instability? – Ed]. And what’s the key number on this chart? 11.1% Yr-on-Yr, that’s what.

The #NYT posts this org chart of “How ISIS works”. How on earth the reporters from the Gray Lady managed to verify this data is beyond me given that #ISIS seems to decapitate most western journalist that they come into contact with. Yet the piece of information they seem to have left out is in the description of the Two Deputies to the Calph of ISIS, Abu Baka al-Baghdadi. Surely they should add this statement: “One of these two men will have to step into the Calph’s leadership shoes when, out of nowhere, a USAF RQ-1 / MQ-1 Predator drone helps him meet his maker.” On the plus side, it is unlikely that this statement will need to be changed about the deputy’s replacement! 

As the UK Prime Minister David Cameron awaits tomorrow's outcome of the most important non-war related vote on this Island in 300 years, perhaps he is thinking about raising the nation's threat level to “Critical Salmond”! 

I think we should be told... :-)

South of the border we are disenfranchised as Scots vote whether to leave the #UK.
Instead of pandering to Scottish nationalist sentiment with 'The Vow', like our UK party leaders (?), ordinary people should call their Scottish chums who can vote and say: "We should let our two independent political and cultural systems go head-to-head. We can still respect and learn from each other but let the best organised, most competitive, freest, least corrupt political system win! It’s time for Scotland to Grow Up. It’s Time to Vote ‘Yes’!" Read more.