The co-working giant now controls 15.5 million square feet across 335 locations in 24 countries and says it is the largest tenant in Manhattan, Washington D.C. and London. So, when the next economic downturn arrives, WeWork's landlords might not be able to evict it even if it can't pay its rent... a more likely outcome would be for landlords to "swallow hard and renegotiate the lease agreements on more favorable terms to keep WeWork from creating a full-on panic." They could also have the company start acting as a property manager in the vein of Marriott, which manages rather than owns or leases hotels.

...

No population genuinely worried about abuses of power would even countenance placing a single private company in control of securing the data of both the intelligence community and the armed services. Add putting a major media organ or two under the same umbrella and you're beginning to enter oligarchy territory.

Moving Amazon closer to America's political and financial capitals isn't just about creating a few jobs. It's also a symbolic move that speaks to the unsettling co-mingling of state and corporate power. We might wake up soon and wish we hadn't put so many eggs in one basket.

In truth, the world's economy has been slowing to a crawl. The German economy contracted in the third quarter. Meanwhile, China is dealing with a massive debt bubble and a trade war. (Note: China is the world's largest importer of oil.)

...

A diversified investor with a helping of large-cap stocks, small-cap stocks, foreign stocks, commodities, bonds, preferreds and/or other income producers had been relying on the influence of mega-caps like Facebook, Amazon and Apple. Bearish price depreciation in one or two of them might have been tolerable. Not all three.

...

"Our view is that there is tremendous wind at our back -- we are the only serious global player out there," he said."Our growth is actually accelerating as our product offering continues to go deeper and reach not just small-sized companies but Fortune 500 companies and everything in between.

If Mrs. May's cabinet signs off on the draft agreement, the next step is for European Union leaders to give it their blessing at a meeting at the end of the month.

Part of the strategy is to sell off valuable real estate, the better to enrich the hedge fund, and stick the retail company with costly rental payments to occupy the space that it once owned.

In the case of Sears, the culprit is a hedge-fund operator named Edward Lampert, once a senior merger guy at Goldman Sachs. In 2005, Lampert merged Sears with Kmart, loaded both up with debt, and used some of the debt on stock buybacks to pump up the share price and enrich shareholders, notably himself and his hedge fund.

...

"Experienced borrowers will act in their economic interest and will turn in the keys to malls that don't merit further investment. They don't want to service the loan anymore," Edward Reardon, head of CMBS research at Deutsche Bank, said in a phone interview. "We think the number of malls that don't merit investment will expand."

This is happening because malls are losing anchor stores and as a result would have to significantly cut rents for existing occupants, Reardon said, noting that mall owners fleeing their properties early is a "relatively new phenomenon."

That may mean trouble ahead for investors. While the delinquency rate in the CMBS market is now at post-crisis lows, the mall-related pain may not show up for a couple years, according to analysts. That's because the securities with the highest exposure have loans that won't mature until 2021 or later.

...

Indeed, if you look just at losses suffered under Republican presidents, the total for 2018 exceeds all but two midterms going back to the Great Depression. The 2018 total even edged out the losses under George W. Bush in 2006, which was the last time the Democrats re-took the House in a midterm election.

"This one was clearly pretty bad," said Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist.

...

At this point, I seriously doubt the Fed has a solid grasp of the (direct and indirect) sources of the Trillions of global liquidity that have flooded into U.S. securities and asset markets over the past decade. I take them at their word that they don't discern the degree of leverage that would typically indicate a Bubble. Yet this has been the most atypical of global Bubbles. I am not convinced the Fed knows where to look for the leverage most germane to today's global Bubble. And, I'm compelled to add, the whole world seems oblivious. Speculative deleveraging is not on the Fed's radar, and this is a problem for the markets.

''

These groups accounted for more than 75 percent of the $800-plus million spent by all dark money organizations between January 2010 and December 2016. They spent the majority of this money on negative attack ads, criticizing candidates from the shadows while purposefully hiding their donors and masquerading as trade associations or "social welfare" nonprofits.

"Dark Money Illuminated" profiles the top 15 dark money groups and shines light on approximately 400 donors and donor organizations who have funded these groups, including companies, trade associations and labor unions. Issue One created a searchable, first-of-its-kind database containing nearly 1,200 transactions linked to these donors, each supported by primary source documents.''

The raid at the Atelier, a 46-story Midtown luxury tower, may be a sign of what's to come. New York and other cities are seeking to limit short-term rentals that can run afoul of local laws designed to limit hotel-style stays in residential buildings.

...

More firms that look like they are going bankrupt don't. Over the last 50 years, it's clear that the average company in the world is more leveraged using more debt than ever before. There was no leveraged-loan or junk-bond markets 50 years ago. Now, these are big dynamic markets available to many firms. They take advantage of it. Interest rates in the last ten year have been low and firms have been overjoyed to leverage their balance sheet to try to earn returns greater than the cost of capital. And the cost of capital, with the lower costs of interest rates, has come down.

... There is a dramatic increase in leveraged loans, in covenant-lite issuance. The defaults will not take place as quickly as they normally would because there are no easy triggers from these covenants. But when they do take place, the ultimate recovery when the firm emerges from Chapter 11 will be lower because the covenant-lite debt kicked the can down the road.

...

He added: "This would not be about re-running the 2016 referendum, but about asking people whether they want to go ahead with Brexit now that we know the deal that is actually available to us, whether we should leave without any deal at all or whether people on balance would rather stick with the deal we already have inside the European Union.

...

Mr Johnson is the sixth minister in Theresa May's government to resign specifically over Brexit, following David Davis, Boris Johnson, Philip Lee, Steve Baker and Guto Bebb.

For Labour, Shadow Brexit Minister Jenny Chapman said Mrs May had "lost all authority and is incapable of negotiating a Brexit deal within her own party, let alone with the EU".

The three corporate giants complained that the Obama administration was being unreasonable and stood their ground, according to people briefed on the investigations. After President Trump took office, they looked to his administration for a more sympathetic ear -- and got one.

Federal prosecutors and the Securities and Exchange Commission have yet to charge Walmart, and the Justice Department reached a much lower settlement agreement with Barclays in March, for $2 billion. R.B.S. paid a civil penalty, but escaped criminal charges altogether.

Across the corporate landscape, the Trump administration has presided over a sharp decline in financial penalties against banks and big companies accused of malfeasance, according to analyses of government data and interviews with more than 60 former and current federal officials. The approach mirrors the administration's aggressive deregulatory agenda throughout the federal government.

The New York Times and outside experts tallied enforcement activity at the S.E.C. and the Justice Department, the two most powerful agencies policing the corporate and financial sectors. Comparing cases filed during the first 20 months of the Trump presidency with the final 20 months of the Obama administration, the review found:

- A 62 percent drop in penalties imposed and illicit profits ordered returned by the S.E.C., to $1.9 billion under the Trump administration from $5 billion under the Obama administration;

- A 72 percent decline in corporate penalties from the Justice Department's criminal prosecutions, to $3.93 billion from $14.15 billion, and a similar percent drop in civil penalties against financial institutions, to $7.4 billion;

-A lighter touch toward the banking industry, with the S.E.C. ordering banks to pay $1.7 billion during the Obama period, nearly four times as much as in the Trump era, and Mr. Trump's Justice Department bringing 17 such cases, compared with 71.

Cool! This is all obviously helping the middle class and working poor (Trump's base, of course) -- not at all lining the pockets of the already mega-rich and powerful, no doubt.

...

Over a decade ago, housing economists Janna Matlack and Jacob Vigdor investigated the economic impact of unequal economic development and found that "in tight housing markets, the poor do worse when the rich get richer."

A "tight" housing market, in this case, is a market like greater New York or greater Washington, where the cost of buying a house greatly exceeds the actual construction costs of new buildings. The problem in markets like this is that when the rich get richer -- say because a new office complex opens and hires 20,000 to 30,000 people for six-figure salaries -- the price of scarce housing rises.

If you actually get a job at Amazon or have the kind of job skills that you plausibly could get a job at Amazon, this will pay off for you because you'll end up with higher wages that more than equal the higher rent. But if you work in a restaurant or cut hair or clean houses or a drive cab, you'll probably end up worse off.

This is pretty surprising given how bad public transit has gotten in NYC.

VW and other carmakers are struggling to adapt quickly enough to stringent rules introduced after the carmaker was found to have cheated diesel emissions tests, with its chief executive Herbert Diess warning last month that Germany's auto industry faces extinction.

...

VW's strategy shift comes as cities start to ban diesel engine vehicles, forcing carmakers to think of new ways to safeguard 600,000 German industrial jobs, of which 436,000 are at car companies and their suppliers.

... the statement noted that the "growth of business fixed investment has moderated from its rapid pace earlier in the year." There was no detail or data given for why officials see investment declining, though companies reported during third-quarter earnings season that some of their investment plans have been curtailed due to the ongoing trade war between the U.S. and China.