"After Ireland, the Dutch economy is most entwined with that of the UK," she said, citing fisheries, meat-processing and flower exports. She warned that many small and medium enterprises had failed to make sufficient preparation for a no-deal Brexit.

...

Germany's foreign minister, Heiko Maas, said on Thursday that plans for a disorderly Brexit would have to be stepped up.

"In the coming days and weeks, we will do everything we can so that Britain exits with and not without an agreement," he told the Bundestag (German parliament).

Spain said on Thursday that staffing of immigration offices would be beefed up if the UK left the EU without a deal. Some 310,000 UK citizens live in Spain and they would have to confirm their residency under a no-deal Brexit, officials said.''

... I rarely heard them frame any of this work and stress in terms of future success or even just stability. They usually didn't talk about their lives according to the myth so many parents, teachers, and community members raised Gen X and millennials with, the one that promises that if you work hard, you'll get a good job and have a nice, stable life or at least do better than your parents did. When they brought up their futures, if they weren't talking about careers, they understood that student debt was inevitable.

It later dawned on me: Why would they believe this myth? People in their 20s, 30s, and 40s teach and raise these kids. Those generations now know from experience that the idea that hard work and a little luck pays off isn't true. Between 30 years of stagnant wages, the rising costs of housing, health care, and education, and a recession just as many of us graduated from college, it's no wonder that millennials are on course to do financially worse than previous generations, just as Gen X did before us.

...

"If I was doing it, I think that you have to call that a national emergency," said Dalio. Then, reasoned Dalio, the President could "[take] responsibility for changing those metrics. I think there's a lot that can be done in private-public partnerships and so on to be able to change it, but I fear that that probably will not be done by the next time we have a downturn, and I fear for what that conflict is going to be like that."

While the federal law specifically prohibits transmission of wagers and related information across state lines, the Justice Department's new interpretation will impact all online gambling because as a practical matter it's difficult to guarantee that no payments are routed through other states, said Aaron Swerdlow, an attorney with Glaser Weil Fink Howard Avchen & Shapiro LLP in Los Angeles.

...

The businesses that will be most directly affected are interstate lotteries that have become well established after 2011, said Dennis Gutwald, an attorney with McDonald Carano LLP in Las Vegas. The Justice Department's new reading of the law won't affect intrastate online wagering, where patrons bet only from within a single state.

...

Online poker and blackjack operations are much less developed than the lotteries, but they will have to examine how they can continue to be run in light of the Justice Department's opinion, according to Gutwald.

The pound, which had fallen below $1.27 earlier on Tuesday, erased its losses after the vote and strengthened to $1.28. Some analysts had predicted the pound would rally if May suffered a major defeat because that would raise the chance of Brexit being delayed.

The crushing loss means parliament may now wield greater control over the process. Capital Economics said lawmakers could move to delay Brexit while they work on alternatives.

...

What's going on? Here's how JPMorgan CFO Marianne Lake described it in her prepared remarks to analysts Wednesday: "Home Lending revenue was down 8%, driven by lower net reduction revenue in a low volume highly competitive environment."

...

Mortgage lending is down, mostly because there aren't enough houses for people to buy to sustain a healthy housing market -- although rising rates aren't helping either. Also thanks to those higher rates, the long refinance boom is over

...

Cohen's troubles started in November 2013, when he pleaded guilty to insider trading and agreed to pay a penalty of $1.2 billion.

It was that April that he first listed the apartment for sale at $115 million, but by the end of 2013 he had dropped the price to $98 million.

In 2014, he went down to $82 million, then $79 million in 2015, and $72 million in 2016. By January 2017, the price was at $67.5 million, according to StreetEasy, and by the fall of that year it was $57.5 million, or $6,389 per square foot.

The New York City Economic Development Corporation said its Blockchain Center in Manhattan will open Thursday a part of a partnership with affiliates of venture-capital fund Future\Perfect Ventures and the Global Blockchain Business Council, a trade organization. The city may also start testing the use of blockchain technology in the fall.

According to its sources -- and confirmed by our own -- SoftBank is now in "detailed negotiations" to invest a comparatively modest $2 billion more into WeWork, plans that could be firmed up as soon as the end of this week.

...

As it stands, including the $2 billion that WeWork looks to receive from SoftBank imminently, SoftBank will have sunk $10 billion into the company. Perhaps it's no wonder that the newest $2 billion is not coming from the Vision Fund but from SoftBank directly. (Son sometimes invests off SoftBank's balance sheet directly, for expediency's sake and, presumably, in a case such as this one, when there may be pushback from Vision Fund investors.)

There's something uniquely American about believing that with a little bit of hard work, anybody can make money fast. In the 19th century, advertisements promised people exclusive selling rights to a certain product, for a fee. They'd pay the money, and then find out that the product didn't exist, or that dozens of other people were selling it. "In the U.S., the depth of commitment to social mobility and uplift seems to give some degree of distinctiveness to how fraud operates," said Edward J. Balleisen, a professor at Duke University who has written a book on the history of fraud in America.

The success of the Amazon-coaching market says something about the current state of the economy. As the American middle class disappears, many people feel as if they've lost their financial footing and are seeking an easy shortcut back to stability. "The best indicator of whether someone will be amenable to being defrauded has to do with financial insecurity," David Vladeck, the former director of the Federal Trade Commission's Bureau of Consumer Protection, who is now a professor at Georgetown, told me.

...

It's not low-income people who fall victim to online frauds, Vladeck said--they don't have the thousands of dollars needed to pay scammers in the first place. It's people who have a little bit of extra money, and want to invest it to get more breathing room. When, during the Great Recession, millions of families lost jobs or saw their income reduced, business-opportunity scams proliferated, he said. Many of the people I talked to at the seminar said they just wanted a little bit more money than they had--to build a bigger retirement fund, work less, buy a vacation home.