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space left open by department store closures is being filled by operators that offer either value or an experience. Former Macy's stores, for example, are being filled by Whole Foods or Life Time Fitness, according to JLL's report, while AMC Theatres and H&M have gone into space once occupied by Sears and JC Penney.

It's all part of the trend toward service-driven, experiential real estate. Consumers are looking for experiences; something that cannot be recreated online, or that can be posted on Instagram. Or both.''

But it ain't happening, folks! Tax cuts are not paying for themselves. Yes, there's more economic growth, but there's less revenue. Of course massive deficits are stimulative. Even we non economists know that. But where's the revenue growth? It's nowhere to be found.

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Furthermore, the uptick in GDP growth isn't even as high as a couple of quarters in 2014. So there's not even that much evidence that the tax cut is stimulating much. For sure the economy would have been slower without it, but the limited economic gains produced by this spending have a cost.

I hate to beat the horse that's already dead, but that cost is massive federal borrowing. The deficits must be paid for by the issuance of ever increasing amounts of Treasury debt. When that debt comes to market dealers and investors must buy it. The Fed stopped printing the money to buy all that paper at the end of 2014. And since October of 2017, the Fed has actually been extinguishing money. There's less and less money in the banks, making it that much tougher for dealers and investors to absorb all the new paper.

Because of that, Treasury bill and note yields have been blowing the roof off. Short term bill rates and 2 year note yields are skyrocketing. The yield on the 10 year note is knocking at the door of 3% again.''

No. There's no evidence that this was even material... In other words, the rally was based on the idea that the Fed might not tighten as fast or as much if inflation is really slowing. It's perfectly obvious to us that it isn't.

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There's simply no reason in the CPI data to believe that the Fed will back off from its tightening regimen. The longer the market stays high and the more it rises, the greater the risk of a severe adjustment.

I'm still waiting, because $1 billion of bitcoin will evaporate in a week or two of selling. $2 or $3 billion of bitcoin gets transacted a day... Already 82% of all bitcoins are mined and around May 2020 new supply will halve. You can love or hate that, but bitcoin is solid deflationary money. We shouldn't hold the ‘digital gold' moniker against it. Bitcoin is a global currency, with increasing acceptance, a huge brand up there with Trump and the NFL, a global audience and a record of appreciation.

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What this basically means is that the state has a $91 billion debt in addition to its bonded state-related debt of $55 billion. And as the number of retirees and cost of health insurance grows, the OPEB debt will keep growing--unless something is done to reform or rein in these benefits.

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The annual charge for retiree health coverage--which, excluding SUNY, came to about $1.6 billion in fiscal 2018--is just the tip of a very big iceberg. Counting all public agencies in New York, including localities and authorities, the Empire Center estimated in 2012 that the total unfunded OPEB liability came to $250 billion--a figure that now probably is closer to $280 billion, if not higher.

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Government retirees at almost every level in New York are entitled to continuing health care coverage at a heavily discounted rate, or even for free--a benefit that has virtually disappeared from the private sector.

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Beijing may also decline to participate in the proposed trade talks with Washington later this month if the Trump administration goes ahead with the additional tariffs, The Wall Street Journal reported on Sunday, citing Chinese officials.

The Journal report quoted one senior Chinese advisory official saying China would not negotiate "with a gun pointed to its head".

This is really fascinating. The debate is between those who believe "policymakers deserve credit for doing enough to stop this from turning into a Second Great Depression", and "those who say policymakers didn't do enough to stop this from being far worse than it needed to be." There is apparently no space for those who think policymakers did too much, or even that they screwed up royally in creating the conditions for the collapse in the first place. Be afraid.

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Some of my New Year's Eve guests continued, as my husband and I did, to support the pro-European, pro-rule-of-law, pro-market center-right--remaining in political parties that aligned, more or less, with European Christian Democrats, with the liberal parties of Germany and the Netherlands, and with the Republican Party of John McCain. Some now consider themselves center-left. But others wound up in a different place, supporting a nativist party called Law and Justice--a party that has moved dramatically away from the positions it held when it first briefly ran the government, from 2005 to 2007, and when it occupied the presidency (not the same thing in Poland), from 2005 to 2010.

Since then, Law and Justice has embraced a new set of ideas, not just xenophobic and deeply suspicious of the rest of Europe but also openly authoritarian. After the party won a slim parliamentary majority in 2015, its leaders violated the constitution by appointing new judges to the constitutional court. Later, it used a similarly unconstitutional playbook to attempt to pack the Polish Supreme Court. It took over the state public broadcaster, Telewizja Polska; fired popular presenters; and began running unabashed propaganda, sprinkled with easily disprovable lies, at taxpayers' expense. The government earned international notoriety when it adopted a law curtailing public debate about the Holocaust. Although the law was eventually changed under American pressure, it enjoyed broad support by Law and Justice's ideological base--the journalists, writers, and thinkers, including some of my party guests, who believe anti-Polish forces seek to blame Poland for Auschwitz.