The breach involved Securities and Exchange Commission's EDGAR filing system, which houses market-moving information with millions of filings ranging from quarterly earnings to statements on acquisitions.

The SEC said on Wednesday evening it discovered last month that cyber criminals may have used a hack detected in 2016 to make illicit trades.

No doubt such ill-gotten information was fed to some "flash boys" at some point...

Yeah, totally unexpected that people putting more of their necessities on credit cards out of obvious desperation would lead to more delinquencies ...

"The high leverage will amplify the damage to the economy if a property bust happens," said Bloomberg Intelligence economist Fielding Chen. "The shock wave will be passed onto the entire financial system, and losses will be greater," he said.

Once home prices tumble, about 40 percent of Chinese banks will be hit hard, according to a recent research note from Ping An Securities.

Exactly 16 years ago Thursday, President Bush signed Proclamation 7463, giving himself sweeping powers to mobilize the military in the days following terrorist attacks that crashed planes into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and a Pennsylvania field. It allowed him to call up National Guard and Reserve troops, hire and fire military officers, and bypass limits on the numbers of generals that could serve.

...

"The president is given these emergency powers as a temporary measure until Congress has time to act. It stretches credulity to think Congress hasn't had time to act since 9/11 happened," said Elizabeth Goitein, co-director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice. "We should not be treating 9/11 as an emergency in 2017."

...

The perpetual war footing has had a striking lack of examination. Under the National Emergencies Act -- a post-Watergate law intended to rein in presidential emergency powers -- the president needs to renew the emergency each year or it lapses. But Congress is also supposed to review each emergency every six months. It never has.

...

And it's not just 9/11. Presidents have declared scores of emergencies over the past 40 years, dealing with everything from the Iran Hostage Crisis to the Swine Flu. More than 30 of those national emergencies remain in effect -- and Congress has never reviewed a single one in the history of the National Emergencies Act.

Is the Trump-as-antiwar-candidate lie sufficiently dead and buried yet?

"This is as close to having a castle in New York City as you can get," developer Ken Horn tells the Post.

...

So far, only one condo -- at 157 W. 57th St., known as One57, the "billionaire's building" -- has sold for more than $100 million. Both the Woolworth Building and One57 were once the city's tallest building.

To date, the most expensive downtown purchase was a $50.9 million trade at Walker Tower in Chelsea. But that 2013 purchase was made with dirty money linked to the multibillion-dollar Malaysian money-laundering scandal and the feds are trying to seize it.

Billionaire Steve Cohen, who paid $1.8 billion in fines after pleading guilty to insider trading a few years ago, first tried to sell his apartment at 141 E. 58th St. for $115 million in 2013. This month, that penthouse duplex went back on the market for $57.5 million.

This all looks peak-ey to us....

...

Minutes from the July meeting showed deepening worries about a prolonged period of low inflation. FOMC participants -- including Fed governors and regional bank presidents -- forecast that inflation will reach their 2 percent target in 2019, compared with an expectation of 2018 in June, based on median estimates. They have missed the target for most of the past five years.

...

After QE1 ended when we knew exactly the full size and expiration date (March 31st, 2010), the market topped out three weeks after and then fell 17 percent. After QE2 ended when we also knew the exact amount and deadline (June 30th, 2011), the market peaked one week later and then fell about 20 percent. Around the time QE3 ended with the lead up being a very methodical process of tapering, stocks had a hissy fit of about 10 percent only saved by James Bullard who hinted that maybe they won't end QE.

In the two months after the well telegraphed first rate hike in December 2015, stocks fell by 13 percent. The stock market of course therefore wasn't very good at discounting the end of major monetary stimulus actions even though they knew what was coming.

The generation currently aged 18-36 are typically spending over a third of their post-tax income on rent or about 12% on mortgages, compared with 5%-10% of income spent by their grandparents in the 1960s and 1970s. Despite spending more, young people today are more likely to live in overcrowded and smaller spaces, and face longer journeys to work -- commuting for the equivalent of three days a year more than their parents.

The research by Willetts' intergenerational commission at the Resolution Foundation thinktank also reveals that today's 30-year-olds are only half as likely to own their own home as their baby boomer parents. They are four times as likely to rent privately than two generations ago, a sector which has the worst record for housing quality, the report claims.

1/3rd? Sad, but that sounds low to us! It's certainly worse in the usual bubble-icious places in the good 'ol 'States...

Trump is such a grifter, it's mind-boggling. How can someone's political supporters defend such blatant piggy-bank-raiding? Especially by someone who constantly brags about how rich they are and how they are self-funded...

...

The $107 million is a massive amount for even the most lavish inauguration. It's almost twice what Barack Obama took in for a celebration that was much more widely attended and which included many more events... Somehow, Trump supposedly blew through $25 million for [an] abbreviated event that seemed more suitable for a county fair. In a small county. It's an amount that seems amazing even to the people on Trump's own campaign committee. "I couldn't tell you how we possibly could have spent $25 million on a concert," said Kerrigan.

... [After that questionable expense of $25 million,] it's been eight months. How much has been given out? None. None at all.

This is large-scale scammery, even for Trump. The funny thing is, we were initially resistant to the claims of Trump's detractors early on that he just wanted to use the presidency to line his pockets... overtly. But that seems to be panning out to a greater degree than we ever imagined... and it has been going on since the campaign (e.g., jacking up the rent on his own campaign for Trump Tower by 2-3x), to say nothing of the presidency.

The economic impacts, though, are less clear.

For most of the period, GDP struggled to gain more than 2 percent. Wealth disparity grew, income gains were hard to come by and the Fed continually came up short on its inflation goal.

...

In fact, one of the Fed's own economists recently penned a report indicating that QE has come up short of its goals.

"Evaluating the effects of monetary policy is difficult, even in the case of conventional interest rate policy," St. Louis Fed economist Stephen D. Williamson wrote. "With respect to QE, there are good reasons to be skeptical that it works as advertised, and some economists have made a good case that QE is actually detrimental."

"When you're cursed with all this debt, there's no way you can compete anymore," said Howard Davidowitz, a retail consultant who worked with Toys R Us in the 1980s and 1990s. "Now they're running up and down the halls trying to pick up the pieces, but there's no way around it: This is a very bad situation, and it will weaken the company forever."

...

The Wayne, N.J.-based company was for decades the country's preeminent toy retailer, with a towering flagship in New York's Times Square and a ubiquitous icon, Geoffrey the Giraffe. In 2009, it purchased competitor FAO Schwarz but eventually closed its New York store on Fifth Avenue, citing high costs.

...

Vermont is setting an ambitious goal of taking its alternative payment model statewide and applying it to 70 percent of insured state residents by 2022 which -- if it works -- could eventually lead to fundamental changes in how Americans pay for health care.

"You make your margin off of keeping people healthier, instead of doing more operations. This drastically changes you, from wanting to do more of a certain kind of surgery to wanting to prevent them," said Stephen Leffler, chief population health and quality officer of the University of Vermont Health Network.

Making lump sum payments, instead of paying for each X-ray or checkup, changes the financial incentives for doctors. For example, spurring the state's largest hospital system to invest in housing. Or creating more roles like Lajoie's, focused on diagnosing problems with housing, transportation, food and other services that affect people's well-being.

...

Critics, however, worry that it will create a powerful tier of middlemen charged with administering health-care payments without sufficient oversight. Those middlemen are Accountable Care Organizations, networks of hospitals and doctors that work to coordinate care and can share in the rewards if providers are able to save health-care costs, but remain on the hook if costs run too high. In Vermont, the goal is to limit the growth in overall annual health care spending to 3.5 percent each year.