Good morning everyone. Have you been bored with Greece and the Troika lately? No problem. In an M. Night Shyamalanic twist, Greek Prime Minister Alexis Tsipras finally pulled his trump card and called for a national referendum on whether or not he should accept the Troika’s perfidious demands. Given the fact that we have no idea how the Greek left will set this referendum, all signs currently point to a “no” vote and a huge slap in the face for the ECB while the IMF and the European Commission both stand to lose earth-shakingly huge amounts of money. The referendum also stands to question who really holds power in Greece – the left, or the right – making the event quite a big deal in modern Greek history.
Here’s what else you should know:
Terrorist attacks rattle three continents. As if people didn’t have enough problems already, terrorists launched four attacks Friday, killing at least 37 tourists at a Tunisian beach resort, at least 27 worshippers in a Kuwaiti mosque, an unknown number of casualties in Somalia, and severed a man’s head at a US-owned industrial gas plant in Lyon. WSJ
Ebay approves PayPal spin-off. Board members of the e-commerce juggernaut Ebay have paved the way for PayPal to become a separate public company. The online payment system is slated to list on the NASDAQ under the ticker PYPL, and Ebay shareholders will be receiving one share of PYPL for each share of EBAY that they have on July 17. MarketWatch
Americans now totally cool with mediocre growth. After growing desensitized to all the “new normal” talk going on, Americans have apparently moved on and sent household confidence data upwards despite lackluster growth in the nation’s economy, even placing bets that incomes will outdo inflation in the next couple of years. Bloomberg
The IMF has more advice for the Fed. After surprising the world by telling the Fed to hold rate hikes until 2016, the IMF seems to have another “suggestion” for the Fed, telling them that they should ditch their famous dot plots because: “(t)he public cannot identify which dots belong to which individual and the median of the dots may be far from internally consistent with the median of the marcroeconomic forecast.” I wonder what’s behind all of this recent weight-pushing by the IMF. CNN
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