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.

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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".

The good news is, the next one will probably generate a somewhat less painful hit than past episodes, according to their analysis. The bad news? Diminished financial market liquidity since the 2008 implosion is a "wildcard" that's tough to game out...

Assuming an average-length recession, the model came up with the following peak-to-trough performance estimates for different asset classes in the next crisis, according to the note:

U.S. stock slide of about 20 percent.

A jump in U.S. corporate-bond yield premiums of about 1.15 percentage points.

A 35 percent tumble in energy prices and 29 percent slump in base metals.

A 2.79 percentage point widening in spreads on emerging-nation government debt.

A 48 percent slide in emerging-market stocks, and a 14.4 percent drop in emerging currencies.

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[But] JPMorgan's Marko Kolanovic has previously concluded that the big shift away from actively managed investing -- through the rise of index funds, exchange-traded funds and quantitative-based trading strategies -- has escalated the danger of market disruptions. He and his colleagues wrote in a separate note Monday of the potential for a future "Great Liquidity Crisis." ... This change has "eliminated a large pool of assets that would be standing ready to buy cheap public securities and backstop a market disruption," Chang and Loeys warned.

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Nasdaq cut the entire trade on Wednesday and the exchange confirmed that the loss accounted for all of the exchange's own default fund of €7m and swallowed €107m, or two-thirds, of its €166m mutual default fund that clearing house members must contribute to.

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With Nasdaq and members of its clearing house repairing the damage, questions as to how a single trader could come close to wiping out the clearing house's layers of protection will merit the attention of regulators, including the European Central Bank.Members of the clearing house include some of the biggest banks and energy traders such as Morgan Stanley, UBS and Equinor, Norway's state oil company... .The catalyst for the trading loss was a series of backfiring bets on the price difference between German and Nordic power markets, according to multiple sources in the industry.

The action in the bond market signals mounting worry about the high-wire act at Tesla. Elon Musk is scrambling to ramp up Model 3 production fast enough to turn a profit -- and use that money for looming debt payments.

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More than $9 billion of Tesla's debt is scheduled to mature before 2025, including a total of $2.7 billion this year and next, according to a Goldman Sachs research report that called the company's balance sheet "concerning."

"Tesla is extremely leveraged. They have a gun to their heads dictated by the timing of the debt payments," said Cowen's Osborne, who has an "underperform" rating on the stock.

And in addition to Tesla, the government is gunning for Zuckerberg and Facebook. Snapchat is proving to be a disastrous investment (down nearly 65% from its IPO). WeWork bonds just got downgraded to junk... We're starting to see major cracks in tech investors' faith.

This is a MAJOR turn that's taken place over the last couple of months. And if tech stocks go down, the market is going with it. Tech stocks, in particular "FAANG" stocks -- Facebook, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Google -- have been holding this market up for a long time. Tech stocks have been responsible for around 95% of stock market gains this year.

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In addition to investor's losing faith, the government is also breathing down the necks of these tech giants... Senator Bernie Sanders introduced the cutely named Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act (aka Stop BEZOS Act) that aims to tax companies for low-wage employees receiving government assistance.

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And now companies are viewing their visionary founders as liabilities... Apparently investors and boards have woken up to the fact that these guys are fallible (and mortal), so there's more talk of key man risk insurance should anything happen to them.

It's been nothing but buttercups and unicorns for tech stocks these past few years. And these recent developments go to show you, everything moves in cycles. And we may be entering a downcycle in tech.

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A shift away from the focus on the neutral rate could buttress the arguments of those who feel the Fed should instead pay more attention to financial markets, and particularly to the evolution of financial risks.

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In a paper released Thursday evening, [Boston Fed President] Rosengren said the Fed in conjunction with state and local authorities should be preparing more to fight the next recession, including with the possible use of higher capital buffers for banks.

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But Trump got it wrong -- way wrong -- when he said it hasn't happened in a century. In the last 70 years, it's happened in at least 62 quarters, most recently in 2006.

Yes, and this is assuming GDP won't simply get revised down...

According to three people briefed on the initiative, Chinese Communist party officials have invited the heads of America's leading financial institutions to attend a "China-US Financial Roundtable" in Beijing on September 16th, followed by a meeting with Wang Qishan, vice-president of China.

Chinese officials hope the new group, which will be jointly chaired by Zhou Xiaochuan, a former Chinese central bank governor, and John Thornton, the former Goldman Sachs executive who now chairs mining group Barrick Gold, will meet every six months to discuss Sino-US relations and advise the Chinese government on financial and economic reforms.

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People briefed on the planning for the China-US Financial Roundtable said it reflected the Chinese government's frustrations in dealing with Mr Trump, who has refused to designate a point person for China relations and has increasingly deferred to the hawkish views of Robert Lighthizer, the US trade representative.

Stocks have since recovered all their losses, rallied to new highs, and extended their bull-market run to a record streak. But stocks are called risk assets for a reason -- their volatility -- and Citi's equity trading strategy team is alerting clients on the conditions that are brewing ahead of the next plunge.

"Indeed, after flirting with 'euphoric' levels for the past 2 weeks, Citi Research Strategy's Panic-Euphoria model finally tipped over the threshold this week [into euphoric territory], suggesting a 3x higher likelihood of negative SPX returns over the next twelve months," Antonin Jullier, the global head of equity trading strategy, said in a client note on Wednesday.

The Fed claims to be able to engineer a "soft landing," but that virtually never happens in reality. It's even less likely to happen in this current bubble cycle because of how long it has gone on and how distorted the financial markets and economy have become due to ultra-cheap credit conditions.

I'm from the same school of thought as billionaire fund manager Jeff Gundlach, who believes that the Fed will keep hiking interest rates until "something breaks." In the last economic cycle from roughly 2002 to 2007, it was the subprime mortgage industry that broke first, and in the current cycle, I believe that corporate bonds are likely to break first, which would then spill over into the U.S. stock market.

... Because of the record debt burden in the U.S., interest rates do not have to rise nearly as high as in prior cycles to cause a recession or financial crisis this time around.

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"If we are likely to live in a world of systematically lower interest rates, systematically more higher asset price multiples than we have in the past," then the case "for prudential regulation and for high levels of capital requirements in banks and more financial institutions is greatly increased," Summers said.

Continually low interest rates, a feature of the nine-year-old U.S. expansion where the policy rate is only 1.75 percent to 2 percent currently, can produce asset bubbles.

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The Fed asserted that if every bank continued to pay out capital in the form of dividends and share buybacks despite the severe scenario, "that none would have any capital deficiency." "That, I would suggest, is a comically absurd conclusion that is belied by the most elementary analysis of the beta of those major financial institutions," Summers said. "And the fact that that assertion continues to be made has to undercut whatever credibility one would would otherwise attach to the very substantial efforts that have been made to strengthen financial regulation."

Summers's criticism follows similar calls by officials such as Cleveland Fed President Loretta Mester, Boston Fed President Eric Rosengren, Kansas City Fed President Esther George and Fed Governor Lael Brainard to use the current period of strong growth and rising asset prices to ask banks to build up capital beyond the stress test requirements.

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A survey conducted by Douglas Elliman found that about 20 percent of all retail space in Manhattan is currently vacant, she said, compared with roughly 7 percent in 2016.

While a commercial crisis might more likely be associated with periods of economic distress, this one comes during an era of soaring prosperity, in a city teeming with tourism and booming with development.

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Particularly hard hit are gentrifying areas in Brooklyn and many of Manhattan's top retail strips in some of the world's priciest shopping districts, from Broadway in SoHo to Madison Avenue on the Upper East Side.

Yeah right, it's just a "period of prosperity" -- not a time of papered-over economic lacunae using cheap money...

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Those penalties, if applied, would come on top of tariffs the administration has already implemented on roughly $53 billion in Chinese imports and on another $200 billion that could be imposed in the coming days.

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Imposing tariffs on an additional $267 billion in goods from China -- on top of the roughly $253 billion that have already been imposed or are pending -- would mean virtually all current imports from China would be caught in the crossfire, including consumer goods like cellphones and televisions. Trump‘s comments Friday seemed to indicate that he was prepared to put in place the duties on the additional amount without any new public input or comment period.

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"The notion that the president is going to add an extra $267 billion worth of tariffs is grossly irresponsible and possibly illegal," Jose Castaneda, a spokesman for the Information Technology Industry Council, said in a statement. "While we cannot overstate the potential economic harm of such a decision, we also question whether the administration has done the necessary investigation of Chinese policies and practices to justify this level of tariffs under the Section 301 statute. We urge the administration to clearly explain how Section 301 allows it to take such action."