SoftBank, a Japanese technology giant that is already the largest outside shareholder in WeWork, is offering to take a controlling stake by accelerating a $1.5 billion investment it had planned to make next year and by buying up to $3 billion in shares held by other investors, two people said. SoftBank is also offering to put together loans totaling $5 billion from a consortium of financial institutions, including itself.

JPMorgan's proposal consists of several parts, including new bonds, some of which would carry high interest rates, according to a person with knowledge of its plans. That package could add up to roughly $5 billion.

Return on equity has fallen below their costs for nearly 60 percent of banks, which is financially unsustainable in the long run. A downturn in the economy, or even a spread of negative interest rates around the world, could make things even worse.

And banks face new competition from all corners, from fintech start-ups with lower costs to tech giants muscling into lucrative banking activities.

"We believe we're in the late economic cycle and banks need to make bold moves now because they are not in great shape," Kausik Rajgopal, a McKinsey senior partner, told Bloomberg. "In the late cycle, nobody can afford to rest on their laurels."

In cum-ex trades, shares with and without dividend rights were quickly traded between various market participants just before the payout date for the dividend, allowing traders to reclaim double the taxes...

The cum-ex deals orchestrated by the two British bankers on trial in Bonn eventually led to a tax loss of 400 million euros ($443 million).

However, the wider scheme carried out in the first decade of the 21st century, and unearthed in 2017, is thought to have cost state coffers across Europe, including at least 10 countries outside Germany, over $60 billion.

Nearly 500 cum-ex deals worth around 5.5 billion euros are being investigated in Germany, according to the German Finance Ministry. Around 2.4 billion euros has already been recovered by the tax authorities.

This in turn could result in SoftBank assuming WeWork's liabilities, which include long-term leases for office space that it refurbishes and rents out under short-term contracts, according to the sources. WeWork had $18 billion in long-term lease obligations as of the end of June, according its most recent public financial disclosure. It also had $1.3 billion in net debt.

SoftBank has been keen not to burden its balance sheet further, given its net debt of about 5 trillion yen ($46 billion) as of the end of June, more than half its 9 trillion yen market capitalization, according to the Japanese technology conglomerate's most recent quarterly earnings statement.

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Johnson grudgingly asked for an extension to the deadline late on Saturday night, but EU leaders don't necessarily have to accept it. Some have ruled out giving Britain more time, piling pressure on U.K. lawmakers to accept the current deal. But it's unlikely they would want a no-deal scenario and the potential economic hit it could mean for both sides of the English Channel.

But as their promises soared, their profits didn't. It's easy to spend all day riding unicorns whose most magical property is their ability to combine high valuations with persistently negative earnings--something I've pointed out before. If you wake up on a Casper mattress, work out with a Peloton before breakfast, Uber to your desk at a WeWork, order DoorDash for lunch, take a Lyft home, and get dinner through Postmates, you've interacted with seven companies that will collectively lose nearly $14 billion this year. If you use Lime scooters to bop around the city, download Wag to walk your dog, and sign up for Blue Apron to make a meal, that's three more brands that have never recorded a dime in earnings, or have seen their valuations fall by more than 50 percent.

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A further 11 traders have been prosecuting for manipulating Euribor, the eurozone equivalent of Libor. The SFO said aspects of its Euribor investigation remain open.

"Europe is at the limitation of that, Japan is (too) and the U.S. doesn't have much to go on for that," he told CNBC's Geoff Cutmore.

Dalio said the world was also experiencing the biggest wealth gap since the 1930s and that was creating political stress.

Migration patterns worsen these trends. A growing percentage of young people now dream of city life, but their preferences inadvertently reduce their political clout: "18 percent of rural residents are 65 or older versus 15 percent in suburban and small metro counties and 13 percent in cities," the Pew Research Center reported last year. Millennials, concentrated in metropolitan areas, are the predominant generation of potential voters in only 86 congressional districts, while boomer voters predominate in 341. By 2040, 70 percent of Americans are expected to live in the 15 most populous states; that would mean that 70 percent of America will be represented by only 30 senators.

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The other critical divide is the economy. The boomers who came of age in the 1950s and '60s benefited from boom times while millennials and Generation Z have been dogged by the aftermath of the mortgage meltdown, an underwhelming recovery and Gilded Age levels of inequality. One generation enjoyed a comparatively high minimum wage, affordable college tuition and reasonable costs of living; for everyone after, stagnating wages, ballooning student debt and unaffordable housing have become the norm.

"Millennials are less well off than members of earlier generations when they were young," a 2018 report by economists from the Federal Reserve Board bluntly states. Other economists have shown that a household headed by someone born in 1970 has a quarter less income and 40 percent less wealth than one headed by a comparable person born in 1940. In contrast, between 1989 and 2013, only the cohort of families headed by people at least 62 saw an increase in median wealth. Older people are more likely to own property, stocks and other assets -- and, consequently, to prefer policies that will keep the values of those assets high. No wonder so many young people have pivoted left, rejecting conventional wisdom about the virtues of unfettered capitalism.

Both billionaires erred in drinking Adam Neumann's Kool Aid that an office-sharing supplier was, somehow, a tech disruptor. Now, Son and Dimon are embroiled in a race to save face by rescuing a corporate boondoggle better left to die.

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Dimon appears to be determined to perpetuate the myth of omnipotence bestowed on him in 2008. As Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers crashed, Wall Street executives faced existential crises. JP Morgan Chase avoided the worst the subprime debacle. Dimon played the role of white knight. There is reputational risk to admitting he got played by Neumann's we-are-a-game-changer spiel.

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There's a good argument Son should walk away. Sure, WeWork accounts for 10% of his $100 billion Vision Fund. Son could write it off completely, apologize to shareholders and pivot elsewhere to raise returns.

Yet Son appears to be embracing Japan Inc.'s worst impulses by tossing a life-preserver at a drowning company. As the Nasdaq tech-IPO set hit a wall in the 1990s, Japan swung into bailout mode. Bureaucrats and business lobby bigwigs joined hands to stop any major company from going bust or being acquired by overseas executives.

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SoftBank's latest deal may not solve WeWork's governance issues, depending on how the voting shares work out, said Erik Gordon, a professor at the University of Michigan's business school.

"If they do it without getting voting control away from Neumann, they will miss their best chance of solving the governance problem that will keep the company from going public," he told Business Insider in an email.''

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Can the market keep chugging along in the face of historic valuations? Evans says it's possible but investors "will need a theme to fuel the delusion."

Those themes could come in the form of "QE Forever," though he says that's not likely. "That jig is almost up and any further rise in inflation will put a stake through its heart," Evans wrote in his post.

Now the Fed has turned on its unaccountable money spigot to Wall Street once again and is attempting to pass it off as part of its normal open market operations --  keeping Congress and the American people in the dark. To date, the Fed has refused to name which Wall Street firms are taking the hundreds of billions of dollars in revolving loans and how much each is receiving.

... To our shock and dismay, many of Pittman's articles that we found referenced in academic journals about the Fed have been purged from Bloomberg News. (We asked Bloomberg via email to explain its removal of these articles but have yet to hear back. We'll update this article should we receive a response.)

One worker said: "I left crypto to join an even more ludicrous ‘parody, IRL [in real life]' enterprise. Didn't even think that was possible."

Neumann, 40, cashed in around $700m of his own shares in WeWork before a share sale that at one point valued WeWork at $47bn. The company has begun attracting larger tenants, including IBM and Microsoft. The Guardian uses a WeWork space in California.

The big picture: Treasury borrowing surpassed $1 trillion during President Obama's first term as government spending soared amid the stimulus to combat the 2008 financial crisis, but it has steadily declined in the years since, settling down to $519 billion in 2017 before nearly doubling last year.

Experts say your body does not adapt to noise. Large-scale studies show that if the din keeps up--over days, months, years--noise exposure increases your risk of high blood pressure, coronary heart disease, and heart attacks, as well as strokes, diabetes, dementia, and depression. Children suffer not only physically--18 months after a new airport opened in Munich, the blood pressure and stress-hormone levels of neighboring children soared--but also behaviorally and cognitively. A landmark study published in 1975 found that the reading scores of sixth graders whose classroom faced a clattering subway track lagged nearly a year behind those of students in quieter classrooms--a difference that disappeared once soundproofing materials were installed. Noise might also make us mean: A 1969 study suggested that test subjects exposed to noise, even the gentle fuzz of white noise, become more aggressive and more eager to zap fellow subjects with electric shocks.