Been there, done that, nailed that demon...

Breaking: passengers on plummeting airplane vote against gravity

If you had invested €1,000 in Apple stock in the beginning of 2012, you would have €1,670 in a year. Not bad. But if you had invested €1,000 in cocaine . . . after a year you would have €182,000.” This, of course, assumes that your investment made it safely from the jungle of Colombia to the streets of London but given that, in Britain, police pick up less than 20 per cent of the coke entering the country, it’s a risk worth taking.

Back in the 1990s the British were told they’d be in deep trouble if they didn’t give up the pound sterling for the common currency. The British economy would tank, they were told. Britain would become “isolated.” Oh, and you could forget about London remaining a big financial center. Without the euro, London would be finished. So much for that. If you want to see how finished London really is, try buying a house there.

Greece is approaching default. Don’t panic: it’s happened before, on six separate occasions since the country gained independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1832.

Based on the stock’s sharp price movement after-hours on Wednesday, Twitter is actually worth about $1 billion more without Dick Costolo as CEO than with him. Make of it what you will.

[Greece] June payments are due the IMF and they have been stiffed before by others and life goes on.  So global financial circles don’t see that as a big deal – just the news media does.

According to the IMF, the only other country which has ever used this obscure technical provision to bundle principal payments at month-end was Zambia in the 1980s. Back in January, we had warned that the policies of Syriza, if fully implemented, could turn poor Greece into a populist paradise like Venezuela, just without the oil.