...

In a society where women are still expected to give up work when they marry, and where sex outside marriage remains taboo, men are increasingly finding it hard to find stable work. 

Despite the country having an unemployment rate of under 3 per cent, and a notorious "salaryman" culture where people work at the same company for decades, among the younger generation there has been a huge rise in the number of irregular workers. 

According to Jeff Kingston, a professor at Temple University Japan campus, around 40 per cent of the modern Japanese workforce are in low-paid "irregular" jobs and only about 20 per cent of these workers can expect to have a stable career.

...

Such a deal goes against the grain of most high-risk debt sales in Europe this year, as the loan market has typically offered better terms than the bond market for highly leveraged companies.

Interest rate margins on European leveraged loans are typically just 3 to 4 per cent, and new deals are now "covenant-lite" as standard, meaning they lack the protections lenders traditionally demanded to lend to riskier companies.

"A company moving from the loans to bonds is usually a red flag these days," said Azhar Hussain, head of global high yield at Royal London Asset Management.

"You really have to ask why they haven't been able to reprice their loans, as pretty much everyone with leveraged loans has done that this year."

The European sub-investment grade market has this year seen 12 bond-to-loan refinancings totalling €4.7bn, according to S&P Global's unit LCD.

...

"I can only describe these recent deals as FILTHY: Failing In Loans, Trying High-Yield," said one bond fund manager.

The European high-yield market has seen a rush of riskier deals this month, with Hema and Klöckner Pentapast both pricing triple-C rated bonds at chunky 8.5 per cent yields, for example.

"They're getting the crap the loan market doesn't want," said one manager of collateralised loan obligations, which primarily buy leveraged loans.

In a bit of drama, McCain said Monday night that he will return to the U.S. Capitol on Tuesday to vote on whether to start debate on the health-care bill. The senator had been recuperating from surgery in Arizona.

...

It is unclear, however, if McCain's return will improve Republicans' prospects of passing a key procedural hurdle to move the health-care bill forward. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) has insisted he intends to hold a vote to start debate on health care on Tuesday -- even though it's prospects are murky at best.

Earnings per share was $5.01, beating an average estimate of $4.49, and would have been $8.90 if not for the EU antitrust fine announced last month, Alphabet said. Earnings per share was $7 in the second quarter of 2016.

But the company's shares, which closed up in regular trading on Monday, fell about 3 percent to $968 after the bell.

...

"You're seeing some profit-taking after a pretty good run," FBN Securities analyst Shebly Seyrafi said in an interview.''

Profit-taking... or is good new now "bad news"? Hmm... Anyways, here's more thorough commentary from TechCrunch -- including a note about Google's now-rising traffic acquisition cost.

...

Now, almost a month later, confirmation of the white coup/regime change in Riyadh has been splashed on the front page of The New York Times, attributed mainly to the proverbial "current and former United States officials".

The backlash could take on a new, far broader dimension if it turns out that the excess emissions were the result of illegal collusion by a de facto cartel. The investigation could also lead to billions of euros in fines.

In a statement on Saturday, the European Commission partially confirmed a report in Germany's Der Spiegel magazine that said the authorities were investigating evidence that representatives of the automakers met regularly to agree on technical specifications for everything from brakes to clutches to emissions systems. The collusion began in the mid-1990s and continued until recently, according to Der Spiegel, which said it had seen documents that were part of an antitrust investigation.

...

In 2006, according to the magazine, the German carmakers agreed to limit the size of the tanks used to hold a chemical solution that helps neutralize diesel emissions. Volkswagen and its Audi division have previously admitted in court documents that the tanks they installed in their cars did not hold enough of the solution, known as AdBlue, to last between oil changes. The company did not want the tanks to take space from the cars' sound systems, according to a criminal complaint against an Audi engineer filed earlier this month in the United States.

Last year, in a much-publicized development, Uber began testing self-driving cars on the streets, putting this city at the forefront of the autonomous-vehicle revolution.

Also last year, in a less publicized development, Jean Yang, 30, returned to this city after more than a decade of living in Boston, finding a Pittsburgh she hardly recognized from her 1990s childhood.

And four months ago, Caesar Wirth, a 28-year-old software engineer, moved from Tokyo to work for a local tech start-up, Duolingo.

These seemingly unrelated events have one thing in common: Carnegie Mellon University's School of Computer Science.

A Revitalized Pittsburgh Says the President Used a Rusty Metaphor JUNE 2, 2017

Much has been made of the "food boom" in Pittsburgh, and the city has long had a thriving arts scene. But perhaps the secret, underlying driver for both the economy and the cool factor -- the reason Pittsburgh now gets mentioned alongside Brooklyn and Portland, Ore., as an urban hot spot for millennials -- isn't chefs or artists but geeks.

In a 2014 article in The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Mayor Bill Peduto compared Carnegie Mellon, along with the University of Pittsburgh, to the iron ore factories that made this city an industrial power in the 19th century. The schools are the local resource "churning out that talent" from which the city is fueled.

Because of the top students and research professors at Carnegie Mellon, tech companies like Apple, Facebook, Google and Uber have opened offices here.

The big tech firms, along with their highly skilled, highly paid workers, have made Pittsburgh younger and more international and helped to transform once-derelict neighborhoods like Lawrenceville and East Liberty.

"When the Federal Reserve signalled that it would begin to raise interest rates, it changed the story. Since then there hasn't been a clear path," he said.

Major bond investors got burned by this turn of events and while their initial reaction was to instruct the banks to switch their portfolios -- prompting a rise in trading fees -- they are now reluctant to take big bets.

Joshi says the long-run trend for low inflation and low interest rates is about to reassert itself. This might mean a few more fees for the bank's bond departments as asset managers adjust their holdings again. But in the longer term, it means a loss of business as investors go back to just holding long-term positions.

Prosecutors also said efforts to extradite Martin-Artajo and Grout, respectively citizens of Spain and France, to face the charges have been "unsuccessful or deemed futile."

Acting U.S. Attorney Joon Kim in Manhattan asked a federal judge for permission to drop charges that included securities fraud, wire fraud and falsifying records. Martin-Artajo and Grout were indicted in September 2013.

...

He stressed that the bank's governing council were unanimous both on the decision to keep its guidance unchanged and to avoid setting a precise date for a discussion of future policy, noting only that it would occur in the autumn.

...

Still, the ECB is unable to kick the can down the road indefinitely as its asset buys are set to run until the end of the year and policymakers argue that a decision on an extension or a gradual wind down must be taken in September or October.

This has no doubt been a force behind gold and silver (and maybe bitcoin?) in the last day...

The community, which had been split on how best to make the cryptocurrency more manageable, rallied behind a code upgrade known as SegWit2x, which aims to increase the network's transaction capacity. That fueled a rally on in bitcoin's price against the dollar, which had plummeted from a peak in June as concerns grew about its future in what has been called a civil war.

...

More than 93 percent of miners who function as the backbone of the digital tokens network locked in support for BIP91, the first necessary step in implementing SegWit2x, according to Coin Dance, a website tracking adoption. Bitcoin's miners are independent groups that verify and process bitcoin's transactions by solving complex computational problems, in order to be rewarded by fees and creation of the digital currency.