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Tension between Bannon and other top advisors to Trump, including Chief Economic Advisor Gary Cohn and National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster, had been festering inside the White House. On Wednesday, Reuters reported that discord between Bannon and McMaster is destabilizing Trump's team.

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Bannon has been the advisor pushing the hardest for a more nationalistic approach to U.S. economic policy. However, his influence has reportedly waned in the Trump administration.

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If Bannon leaves "I think that's positive for the market because it means that Gary Cohn is staying and if Cohn and McMaster are the ones left advising the president, that's ultimately market friendly," said Dave Lutz, head of ETF trading at JonesTrading.

More deck chairs-rearranging (along with Bannon's utter crap were some ballpark-reasonable reform ideas).

"Just raise prices if you need to, don't try to slip this in under the radar and then pretty much blame [it] on employees who need to make a living!" wrote one commenter.

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But the surcharge has now been removed, at least in Washington. When contacted by The Post, Landry's issued a statement from Tim Whitlock, senior vice president of operations and chief operating officer of the Oceanaire:

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The minimum wage in Washington is $12.50 and will rise to $15 by 2020, according to legislation from the D.C. Council approved last year. The minimum wage for tipped workers in D.C. is $3.33, and will reach $5 by 2020.

A study earlier this year found that minimum wage hikes can force restaurants to close, as restaurateurs have been warning us for years -- but typically only bad restaurants. "Among 3.5-star restaurants, every $1 increase in the minimum wage increases the restaurant's chances of closing by 14 percent," wrote The Post's Caitlin Dewey. The Oceanaire currently has 3.5 stars on Yelp.

... There is one other possibility [for redemption]: a crisis. In moments of catastrophe, citizens like to rally around even an unpopular president, seeking unity and leadership. But the signs so far about how Trump might handle a genuine, huge crisis are not promising. In fact, given the chance to deal with a crisis, he has often just made things worse for himself. Over the last week, his improvised language inflamed an already dangerous standoff with North Korea. Then he turned a national tragedy in Charlottesville into a huge personal liability for himself out of an inability to simply condemn racism and leave it at that.

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Concerns have grown over Trump's ability to push through his economic goals, such as tax cuts and infrastructure spending, following the exodus of executives from two prominent business councils in reaction to his response to clashes last weekend in Charlottesville, Virginia.

"Diminishing West Wing support from both business and political allies will continue to abrade investors' confidence in President Trump's economic agenda," Stephen Innes, head of Asia Pacific trading at OANDA in Singapore.

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Building trade groups had urged Trump to revoke the flood plain order, saying it was overly bureaucratic and increased the cost of projects. The Obama order was especially unwieldy because it didn't standardize across the government how sea level rise was to be taken into account, which left each federal agency to come up with its own standards, said Jimmy Christianson, an attorney with the Associated General Contractors.

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Transportation Secretary Elaine Chao has said that regulations, not a lack of funding, are a primary holdup faced by transportation infrastructure projects. But a Treasury Department report released earlier this year found that "a lack of public funding is by far the most common factor hindering completion" of major transportation and water infrastructure projects.

More mostly-bluster from Trump (that might sound good initially at 100,000 feet). Now let's see him craft an infrastructure plan with Congress that would actually fund something (or facilitate funding on a large scale)...

Trump was initially defiant when some business leaders indicated they would leave the councils.

"For every CEO that drops out of the Manufacturing Council, I have many to take their place. Grandstanders should not have gone on," Trump tweeted after a few departures. "JOBS!"

When more business leaders left, Trump pulled the plug.

Classic Trump... undoing/defeating himself within weeks... days... even hours...

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Policy makers basically have until December to either see inflation head back toward their 2 percent target or figure out how to respond if it doesn't behave... Delaying until December gives officials at least four more months of inflation data. Most still see it returning to its target...

The account of the July conclave even suggested some heretical questioning of the link between very low unemployment and wages and inflation. The majority are still wedded to the traditional models.

See also this article. It's hard to believe the Fed doesn't really understand that wages are sluggish and jobs are non-full-time (even though headline unemployment is low) -- or that the stagflationary 70s and low-inflation 90s prove that the economy is often not in "wage-price spiral mode". Rather, it seems more likely that the Fed is just "boxed in", and trying to figure out what it can plausibly (and politically) do to not crash the market too hard.

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With its wide-plank pine flooring and industrial feel, WeLive looks just like WeWork--right down to the lounges where people can spin Nirvana LPs on old-school turntables. Like his office, the apartment came furnished--and equipped with pots, pans, books, and prints, even a flashlight. Mr. Nguyen enjoys fresh sheets, towels and maid service. There is free cappuccino in the lobby and free arcade games in the laundry room. The building even provides a social life, with activities ranging from Pilates to community dinners.

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The rush is on to serve folks like Mr. Nguyen, who wish to dispense with their commute. Facebook, for example, is building on-campus housing for employees. Here in New York, developers looking to lure freelancers and entrepreneurs are adding shared office spaces to new condo and rental projects. A 714-unit luxury rental in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn--named 33 Bond Street--for example, promises to "redefine the notion of work-life balance" with HomeWork, an in-house co-working space with its own coffee bar.

WeWork, meanwhile, says only a "handful" of residents at its Wall Street location also work in the building. But roughly 15% work at one of the 41 other WeWork locations in the city, including five within walking distance of the WeLive.

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"There's considerable political risk in reopening these negotiations," said Cécile Shea, a senior fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a former diplomat. "I'm not sure that the White House, which is not filled with a lot of people with international negotiating experience, is focused on that fact that Canada and Mexico will have demands."

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In remarks Monday, Canadian Minister of Foreign Affairs Chrystia Freeland appeared to take a tough stance as she briefly outlined Canada's main goals -- including adding new provisions to protect the environment and the rights of workers, women and indigenous people, as well as preserving a mechanism for settling disputes that some U.S. industries have opposed.

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Negotiators will also face a particularly ambitious timeline. U.S. and Mexican officials have said they would like to conclude talks before the end of the year, well before Mexico's next presidential election on July 1, 2018 -- when NAFTA could become a contentious political issue.

Chip Roh, the former deputy U.S. chief negotiator of NAFTA, said the timeline will be hard to follow, given the size of the trade agreement. "It's hard for me to see how you have a resolution that everyone can call a win-win in that time frame," Roh said.

But those groups had already decided to dissolve on their own earlier in the day, a person familiar with the process said. JP Morgan Chase chief executive Jamie Dimon, a member of the "Strategy & Policy Forum," told employees in a note on Wednesday that his group decided to disband following Trump's bizarre press conference on Tuesday, in which he appeared to show sympathy for some of the people who marched alongside the neo-Nazis and white supremacists in Charlottesville.

They didn't QUIT, Trump FIRED them! All hail Master-Race God-Emperor Trump!

This figure is higher than in the previous five-year period -- when the costs amounted to £252bn -- and is up 32% on the period 2008-12, the first time the data was collated by the CCP Research Foundation, one of the few bodies that analyses the "conduct costs" of banks.''

The most inspiring campaigners, Senator Sanders on the left and Donald J. Trump on the right, did not convince voters of the wisdom of carefully honed policy prescriptions. They ran on an apocalyptic vision of America under siege, with clear enemies in sight. Mr. Trump, an interloper of scant ideological baggage who took over a Republican Party at least as clueless as Democrats about voters' preoccupations, offered the more powerful apocalypse.

The question for Democrats looking for a path out of the wilderness -- for Mr. Cowan and Senator Sanders; for Senator Warren and the Senate minority leader, Chuck Schumer, who hopes to woo voters by offering a "Better Deal" -- is whether they can appeal to voters still angry because their lives, their aspirations and their sense of self have been derailed over the last few years.

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To recapture the presidency, Democrats must recover the support of the middle class -- people in families earning $50,000 to $150,000, whose vote went to Mr. Trump. Three-quarters of voters in swing states are white, according to data from the Cook Political Report presented by Third Way. Mr. Trump won white voters by 21 percentage points.

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Joan C. Williams, a professor at the University of California Hastings College of the Law who this year published "White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America," a critique of liberals' inability to understand this constituency, argues Democrats can offer an inclusive platform that appeals to all Democratic constituencies, like the proposal presented by Senator Schumer focused on jobs.

... Professor Williams argues against a move to a Democratic center that is friendly toward Wall Street and favors trade agreements, "two of the reasons that the working class is so done with the Democratic Party."

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The banks got bailed out. Their bosses still get paid out. The rest of us get austerity. Whatever technical reforms have followed on from the crash, the economic and business model that created it remains intact. We could have used the nationalised banks to direct credit to strategic industries and regions; instead, Labour and the Tories insisted on treating them as if they were still private sector industries. We could have used the crash to make Britain a far more equal and democratic society. Instead, the UK is still grossly unequal.

And so we remain reliant on debt -- aptly termed "the raw material for bubbles and crashes" by Daniel Mügge at the University of Amsterdam. According to the Bank for International Settlements, the UK is far deeper in the red now than it was when Northern Rock collapsed. Government debt has shot up under the Conservatives, but so too has household borrowing. Were the UK to crash again, its government no longer has the political capital nor the fiscal headroom to save the financial system. And with interest rates scraping along the bottom, the Bank of England has barely any firepower left. Ten years of political fudge and failed austerity has left Britain's state machinery tapped out.