... 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."

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.

However DATA, and a number of Wyoming legislators are championing SPDIs -- a special purpose bank that eschews FDIC insurance, in order to allow for the creation of US banks that are both crypto friendly and allow for the growth and proliferation of Blockchain businesses.

"When it comes to public health, we can go against party lines. And I don't agree with trying to roll back the E.P.A.'s role," said Steve Barnett, Franklin's mayor and a Republican. "Back in the day, there weren't any rules. That's why there was so much contamination," he said.

Many members of If It Was Your Child in the Franklin area play down the politics, noting that both parties have let the cleanup fall by the wayside. Nevertheless, their demands come at a time when the Trump administration has weakened the very rules that could prevent another Franklin.

"We should not have to fight Republicans or Democrats to save our children. It's not a political fight for us," said Stacie Davidson, a Trump voter who co-founded the parents' group with Mrs. Rhinehart (who didn't vote for Mr. Trump).

Mrs. Davidson said, "His loosening of E.P.A. regulations, it's infuriating." She added, "We're ruining the environment for money."

Mrs. Davidson learned in 2014 that her stepson, Zane, who was 10 at the time, had a rare form of leukemia. He is now in remission. She has traveled to Washington to speak in favor of stronger TCE regulations. "What we're fighting for is seemingly being undone right now," she said.

Still, she said, she did not regret her vote. "Trump's a businessman. There are great things he can do for our country. But he's used to building high rises for money," she said. "He's not as environmentally savvy. Our hope is that he surrounds himself with people who are more knowledgeable."

...

Despite the emergence of alternatives to TCE, the Trump administration has stalled action on restricting its use. "There have been greener alternatives to TCE for years," said Tom Forsythe, an executive vice president at Kyzen, a Tennessee cleaning-materials company, who joined E.P.A. officials in a conference call in August 2017 to lay out other options.

...

"I see good things that Trump has done," said Mr. Barnett, the mayor, emphasizing his town's future. "The economy's good. There's been a lot of investment into our city."

So sad to see kids literally poisoned to death because Trump panders to support from business and industry, meanwhile, the effected communities make excuses for Trump based on fictions of all the good he's doing. (Were these same people praising Obama for "surrounding himself with knowledgeable people", or the "economy doing well" on his watch? Our money's on "probably not"...)

Powell also said the central bank would not "hesitate" to change its balance-sheet reduction plan if it was causing problems. Fears that the Fed may be making a policy error by tightening too fast have contributed to the recent skittishness in financial markets, according to several market experts.

"I think he did what the market hoped he would do," said Tom Essaye, founder of The Sevens Report. "What he did with these comments is he acknowledged that they need to be more flexible."

"This is worth a bounce, but at the same time, the major issues facing the market are not resolved. We have a potential earnings problem in this market; we have a potential economic growth problem in this market," Essaye added. "Today's rally is more a result of the overextended downside from yesterday."

"Coincidentally," this is all exactly what Trump wants.

The news sent shudders through global markets. The Nasdaq plunged 3%, closing back in bear market territory. The S&P 500 shed 2.5%, led lower by tech and industrial stocks. The market ended near the lows of the day.

...

Beyond Apple, investors were also rattled by the biggest one-month decline in US factory activity since the Great Recession. The closely-watched ISM manufacturing index tumbled to a two-year low, providing further evidence of slowing growth and pain from the US-China trade war. ISM said manufacturing activity is still growing, but suffered a "sharp decline" last month.

"Awful, and worse to come," Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, wrote to clients on Thursday. "Trade wars are not easy to win."

The "since the Great Recession/2008" comparables are coming at an increasing pace...

... Price cuts tend to be a great leading indicator and give a forward-looking view into the real estate market. So, when one of America's most expensive homes experiences 73% collapse in asking price from 2015, it probably signals that a luxury real estate market crash could be ahead.

...

The seller, Robert Pereira, founder of the Massachusetts-based construction company Middlesex Corp., possibly lost tens of millions of dollars on the transaction; Pereira told The Wall Street Journal in 2015 that the build costs exceeded $100 million.

... only 17 percent of populists stepped down after they lost free and fair elections. Another 17 percent vacated high office after they reached their term limits. But 23 percent left office under more dramatic circumstances--they were impeached or forced to resign. Another 30 percent of all populist leaders in our database remain in power to this day. This is partially a function of the recent rise of populism: Thirty-six percent of those populist rulers who still remain in power were elected over the past five years. But even more of them have been in office long enough to raise serious concerns: About half have led their country for at least nine years.

...

In many countries, populists rewrote the rules of the game to permanently tilt the electoral playing field in their favor. Indeed, an astounding 50 percent of populists either rewrote or amended their country's constitution when they gained power, frequently with the aim of eliminating presidential term limits and reducing checks and balances on executive power.

...

Since 1990, 13 right-wing populist governments have been elected; of these, five brought about significant democratic backsliding. Over the same time period, 15 left-wing populist governments were elected; of these, the same number, five, brought about significant democratic backsliding. This suggests that left-wing populists are not likely to be a cure for right-wing populism; they are, on the contrary, likely to accelerate the speed with which democracy burns out.''