Europe's shadow banking nexus has grown by leaps and bounds since the Lehman crisis and has begun to generate a whole new set of dangers, many of them beyond the oversight of regulators. While tougher rules have forced the banks to retrench, shadow banking has picked up the baton. Hedge funds have ballooned by 150 percent since early 2008.

Investment funds have grown by 120 percent to €9.4 trillion with a pervasive “liquidity mismatch”, investing in sticky assets across the globe while allowing clients to withdraw their money at short notice. This is a recipe for trouble in bouts of stress. “Large-scale outflows cannot be ruled out,” it said. The ECB warned that a rush for crowded exits could set off a wave of forced selling and quickly spin out of control.

Reports Thursday said that at least three North Korean delegations traveled to Iran in late April to help advance the country’s nuclear weapons program. The National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI) released additional information claiming that the North Koreans primarily worked with an Iranian agency tasked with “manufacturing interior parts of nuclear warhead.”

The NCRI’s claims sparked questions from reporters during the State Department’s daily briefing and forced the Obama administration to reveal it is looking into the reports. Some have taken the NCRI claims as further proof of the extensive coordination between Tehran and Pyongyang on the nuclear front. In March, Iran was accused of housing illicit nuclear materials in North Korea to avoid detection by international inspectors.

The NCRI initially disclosed Thursday that based on sources inside Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC), a seven-person delegation of North Korean defense ministry officials travelled to Iran at the end of April. “The delegates included nuclear experts, nuclear warhead experts, and experts in various elements of ballistic missiles including guidance systems,” the NCRI said, according to Reuters.

And now, we get this from Reuters:

"Cash-strapped Greece has racked up mounting debts with international drugmakers and now owes the industry more than 1.1 billion Euros ($1.2 billion), a leading industry official said on Wednesday. The rising unpaid bill reflects the growing struggle by the nearly bankrupt country to muster cash, and creates a dilemma for companies under moral pressure not to cut off supplies of life-saving medicines. Richard Bergstrom, director general of the European Federation of Pharmaceutical Industries and Associations, told Reuters his members had not been paid by Greece since December 2014. They are owed money by both hospitals and state-run health insurer EOPYY."

At the recent National Defense Industrial Association Conference, Defense One reporters saw the Hornet in flight and checked out its surprisingly clear video feed. It’s launched from a small box that straps to a utility belt, which is also where the data is stored, as opposed to on the drone itself, in case it’s captured. The video feeds directly to a small, chest-mounted screen. The operator steers it forward, backward, up and down with a videogame-like one-handed controller, or sets waypoints to allow the drone to fly itself.

The PD-100 has been in operational use for three years, including wide use by British Brigade Reconnaissance Force in Afghanistan. “This is what they use when they check out enemy compounds,” said Arne Skjaerpe, CEO and president of Proxdynamics USA.

It’s the smallest flying robot ever used in a combat setting, says Skjaerpe, who isn’t fond of the term “drone.” He prefers the term “sensor,” more and more of which are making their way onto the bodies of dismounted soldiers. At around $40,000 a system, the Hornet is an expensive sensor. But as drones go, it’s a bargain.

Many agree with him. Mark Rutte, the Dutch prime minister, sums up the need to devolve power away from Brussels thus: "European where necessary; national where possible."

Last week, Dara Murphy, our Minister for European Affairs, said: "Much of what's being suggested and proposed to date by David Cameron would be to the advantage of all of the people of the European Union, particularly in the space of regulation and growth, so we are very optimistic that the UK will remain, as it should be, at the very very heart of decision-making in Europe."

"The wind in Greece, the wind in Spain, the wind in Poland… blows in opposite directions, but all these winds say that Europe must change."

Well, when the most powerful woman in the world (that is, Angela Merkel) responds to the prime minister's wish-list for a different kind of EU with "where there's a will there's a way" and says that, yes, treaty change might indeed be possible - that must sound like success to him.

The European tour this week served a definite purpose. In the long run-up to the UK general election, David Cameron and his ministers irritated a fair few by grandstanding and performing to the Eurosceptic gallery at home while abroad on EU business. But when it comes to the EU's most powerful country, Germany, the details of this trip were less important. Chancellor Merkel, ever the pragmatist, has an eye on the big picture - Europe on the world stage.

She worries that the EU without the British economy, the British military and British diplomatic expertise is weaker and more fragmented in the face of a ruthlessly ambitious China and, in particular, having grown up in communist East Germany, of a newly aggressive Russia just next door.

Angela Merkel, normally so risk averse, was uncharacteristically outspoken standing side-by-side with David Cameron. "I want to find a solution," she said to him. And generally in the EU, when Germany speaks, others follow.

Following talks with Mr Cameron in Berlin, the German Chancellor said that European leaders “cannot say that treaty change is total impossibility”. The Prime Minister is demanding major changes to Britain’s relationship with Brussels before the in-out referendum he has promised to hold by the end of 2017. They came hours after Poland rejected Mr Cameron’s benefit plans as a “definite no”.

However, Germany wants to make it harder for migrants to claim from its own system, and Mrs Merkel said she is closely watching rulings from the European Court of Justice, the EU’s referee. She said European leaders must look carefully at Mr Cameron’s demands before ruling out treaty change. “Where there's a will, there's a way,” she said. "I will go into these discussions constructively. I want to find a solution.”

“Of course, when you are convinced of an idea you cannot say that treaty change is a total impossibility.” She said that the EU is “not a social union” and the level of benefits “vary starkly”. “We have to strike a fair balance with social benefits,” she said. Mr Cameron said he was “very heartened” by her remarks.

Earlier in the morning, Poland’s Prime Minister told Mr Cameron she would fight his benefit plans. They have caused outrage among politicians who vow to defend the “rights” of their expatriots, many of whom send their earnings back home.

IMF chief Christine Lagarde admitted she could not “preclude” a "potential" Greek exit, after four months of tortuous bail-out talks that have failed to get both sides closer to a deal to release aid to the country. “No one wishes the Europeans a Grexit,” Ms Lagarde told Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, suggesting that Greece is closer to leaving the single currency than ever before.

Extinguishing hopes in Athens that the two sides were ready to draft an agreement by the end of the week, Ms Lagarde said recent optimism over the country's future had “sobered”. "It's very unlikely that we will reach a comprehensive solution in the next few days”, said Ms Lagarde, as G7 finance ministers and central bankers met in Dresden on Thursday. She added that the prospect would not be "a walk in the park" for the single currency, but would "probably not be an end to the euro”.

Francis has had showers for homeless people erected near St Peter's Square, but has at the same time also spent millions on international consultants. He brought the Vatican Bank's finances into order, but created confusion in the Curia. He has negotiated between Cuba and the United States, but also scared the Israelis by calling Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas an "angel of peace."

This pope is much more enigmatic than his predecessor - and that is becoming a problem. Right up to this day, many people have been trying to determine Francis' true intentions. If you ask cardinals and bishops, or the pope's advisors and colleagues, or veteran Vatican observers about his possible strategy these days - the Pope's overarching plan - they seem to agree on one point: The man who sits on the Chair of St Peter is a notorious troublemaker.

If it weren't for the recently installed statue of the Madonna of Luján, the patron saint of Argentina, in the pope's library, everything at Catholic Church headquarters would look like it did when Benedict XVI was still in office. This despite the fact that, since the latter's resignation on Shrove Monday 2013, an experiment with an uncertain outcome has been carried out in the Vatican, instigated in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. In the process, Pope Francis is simultaneously fighting on three fronts: against the claims to power of his council, the Curia; against ostentation and pomp in the clergy; and for a radical return to the Gospel.

Indeed, Jorge Mario Bergoglio, the first non-European on the papal throne in over one thousand years, has quickly become a favorite of Catholics - and even more so of non-believers and the media. In his first year, Francis appeared on the covers of both Time and Rolling Stone. Business magazine Fortune named him the world's greatest leader. The Economist raved that Francis was on the verge of reinventing "the world's oldest multinational."

Not surprisingly, critics within the church have begun quietly grumbling in the pontiff's third year, but it is becoming increasingly audible. There are various reasons why they feel uneasy about the man from Buenos Aires: His leadership style is supposedly too authoritarian, his self-marketing is too sophisticated, he doesn't know enough about matters of doctrine.

This year will be a decisive one for the pope. On December 8, exactly 50 years after the closing of the Second Vatican Council - which focused on the relationship between the Catholic Church and the modern world - an extraordinary Holy Year will begin.

“The time has come to ask everybody in Europe Yes or No - if they want sovereignty to decide on their own future”. He added that British PM David Cameron, who is currently on a tour of European capitals to sound out feeling on a renegotiation of EU powers, “with this referendum … has put himself in a powerful position to demand real reforms”.

He also said that if Hollande declines to do it, the National Front will put an in/out EU vote “at the heart” of its 2017 presidential election campaign. The Eurosceptics and anti-immigrant National Front came first in France’s EU elections last year, with 25 percent of the vote, and again in local elections earlier this year.

When I Googled the issue to see who else has picked it up, to my surprise, Armstrong Economics comes up first. Others are quoting me, and I even find it spreading as far as the Central Bank of Nigeria, but I have yet to find any reports on the meeting taking place in London, when my sources are direct.

Other newspapers who have covered my European tour have stated that the “crash” of which I speak is the typical stock market, rather than a crash in government. What is concerning me is the silence on this meeting, when there are more and more reports claiming a cashless society would be better.

If we look at the turning points on the ECM, yes, they have been to the day when there has been a concentration of capital in a particular market. However, it has also picked the turning points in political decisions, such as the formation of the G5 with 1985.65, the very day Greece asked for help from the IMF in 2010, to the day of 9/11. We better keep one eye open at night for this birth of a cashless society that is coming in much faster than expected. Why the secret meeting? Something does not smell right here.