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It was the NY Fed's first such rescue operation in a decade, the last occurring in late 2008.

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On Tuesday morning, the NY Fed launched what's called an "overnight repo operation," during which the central bank attempts to ease pressure in markets by purchasing Treasuries and other securities. The goal is to pump money into the system to keep borrowing costs from creeping above the Fed's target range .

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The episode demonstrates evidence of emerging strains in financial markets and raises concern that the Federal Reserve could be losing its grip on short-term rates.

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The NY Fed announced plans late Tuesday to hold another repurchase agreement operation on Wednesday that would aim to repurchase up to an additional $75 billion.

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The rate on overnight repurchase agreements hit 5% on Monday, according to Refinitiv data. That's up from 2.29% late last week and well above the target range set in July by the Federal Reserve, which is 2% to 2.25%. The surge continued Tuesday, with the overnight rate hitting a high of 10% before the NY Fed stepped in.

Although it doesn't get as much attention as the Dow or the 10-year Treasury rate, this overnight market plays a central role in modern finance. It allows banks to quickly and cheaply borrow money, for short periods of time, often to buy bonds like Treasuries. This market broke down during the 2008 financial crisis.

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"No one knows why this is happening," Jim Bianco CEO of Bianco Research, said on Twitter. "If it persists more than another day or two, it will be a problem."

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In a statement and in the indictment, prosecutors described how the trio executed "thousands" of unlawful trading sequences that included "layering" deceptive orders at different prices in rapid succession. Prosecutors also described attempts to influence market prices toward specific price points to trigger or avoid triggering options.

Trump's trade war already has cost 300,000 American jobs. And every time he opens his mouth about China, the American stock markets get spooked. And then after threatening to escalate his trade war, Trump backed down, and now desperately wants to find a way out of yet another crisis that is entirely of his own making. Because he has no idea what he's doing. Because he is a deeply stupid man who routinely gets his ass kicked on the world stage.

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There are better options. For example, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac could be merged into a single, fully government-owned corporation that would transfer most of its credit risk to private investors, retaining just the catastrophic risk that only the government can bear. This would get private capital involved without letting it so easily shift risk to taxpayers. Pricing the guarantee correctly would be easier. This in turn would promote more competition from completely private lending channels. As it happens, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have already been moving in this direction, issuing special credit-risk-transfer securities and creating a common mortgage-securitization platform.

An Urban Institute analysis found that for a married couple with two children, increasing the household's liquid assets from below $1,000 to between $1,000 and $2,000 would reduce annual benefits from means-tested transfer programs by almost $3,000. IRAs generally count as liquid assets because they can be readily converted into cash (with a penalty), though states have some leeway on how to apply means testing.

There's another risk: once low earners see their take-home pay reduced via automatic enrollment, they may borrow to maintain their standard of living. Recent research found that when federal employees automatically enrolled in their 401(k)-type retirement plan, employee contributions indeed rose. But four years following auto-enrollment, there wasn't any statistically significant increase in those employees' net worth. While the researchers' data were incomplete, the results hinted that less-educated workers may have borrowed more via higher credit cards, auto or mortgage loans. State auto-IRA plans will enroll many more low-wage workers than the federal government plans, so states should investigate how these employees' total household finances react, not simply laud increases in retirement plan balances.

Does this mean states should abandon their auto-IRA plans? No. But they need to rethink the idea that everyone should be saving for retirement at all times of their lives, regardless of income. It just doesn't work that way.

So glad to see this coverage, finally. One of many examples of how the "conventional" financial advice and assumptions do not apply to the large and growing segment of the population that has fallen out of, or cannot attain "middle class" or better status.

The wire transfers are part of a lawsuit against Purdue and individual Sacklers in New York. Letitia James, now the state's attorney general, had issued subpoenas last month to 33 financial institutions and investment advisers with ties to the Sacklers in an effort to trace the full measure of the family's wealth.

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Forbes has estimated that the family fortune is worth $13 billion, a figure the family has not disputed, but many state attorneys general believe that the family has far more hidden away, as a safeguard against the cascade of litigation.

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In addition to the thousands of lawsuits in state and federal court aimed at Purdue itself, some 26 states have named the Sacklers individually, with more, most recently North Carolina, having announced they are about to pursue family members as well.

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A series of transfers involving Mortimer D.A. Sackler, a former Purdue board member, was highlighted in the filings. In one case, $64 million was transferred in 2009 from a previously unknown trust called Purdue Pharma Trust MDAS, through a Swiss bank account, and then to Mr. Sackler, the filing said.

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In a letter to the court Friday, a lawyer in the attorney general's office, David E. Nachman, wrote: "Already, these records have allowed the state to identify previously unknown shell companies that one of the Sackler defendants used to shift Purdue money through accounts around the world and then conceal it in at least two separate multimillion-dollar real estate investments back here in New York, sanitized (until now) of any readily detectable connections to the Sackler family."

"I think we're being really conservative," said Grant Long, the website's senior economist, noting that the study looked specifically at ground-up new construction that has begun to close contracts. Sales in buildings converted to condos, a relatively small segment, were not counted, because they are harder to reliably track. And there are thousands more units in under-construction buildings that have not begun closings but suffer from the same market dynamics.

Projects have not stalled as they did in the post-recession market of 2008, and new buildings are still on the rise, but there are signs that some developers are nearing a turning point.

Already the prices at several new towers have been reduced, either directly or through concessions like waived common charges and transfer taxes, and some may soon be forced to cut deeper. Tactics from past cycles could also be making a comeback: bulk sales of unsold units to investors, condos converting to rentals en masse, and multimillion-dollar "rent-to-own" options for sprawling apartment... The slowdown is uneven and some projects are faring better than others, but for well-heeled buyers there is no shortage of discounts and sweeteners to be had.

... the city's flagging condo market [...] peaked about three years ago amid a glut of inventory. Now the market could face new obstacles, from growing fears of a recession, to changes in tax law and political instability heading into an election year.

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Moreover, a growing share of condos sold in recent years have been quietly re-listed as rentals by investors who bought them and are reluctant to put them back on the market. Of the 12,133 new condos sold between January 2013 and August 2019, 38 percent have appeared on StreetEasy as rentals.

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The downturn has been hardest on the ultraluxury market, which kickstarted the trend toward bigger and fancier apartments more than six years ago. The super-tall One57 tower, completed in 2014 and considered the forerunner of Billionaires' Row, a once largely commercial corridor around 57th Street in Midtown, remains about 20 percent unsold... "That's mind-blowing," Mr. Miller said, because the building actually began marketing eight years ago, in 2011, and a typical building might sell out in two to three years in a balanced market.

In an analysis of seven luxury towers on and around Billionaires' Row, including pending sales, almost 40 percent of units remain unsold... [the analysis shows] there are over 9,000 unsold new units in Manhattan [including] so-called "shadow inventory," which developers strategically do not list for sale to hold off for a stronger market. At the current pace of sales, it would take nine years to sell them... New development is also performing worse than the resale market. From January to late August, there was a 35 percent drop in the number of contracts signed for new development at or above $4 million, compared to the same period last year...

The move comes as WeWork's parent company announced Friday that it plans to make a number of changes to its corporate governance structure in advance of its much-anticipated IPO and amid growing investor concerns.

In an amended S-1 filing, the We Co. said it's changing its high-vote stock from 20 votes per share to 10 votes per share, curtailing WeWork CEO Adam Neumann's voting power... The company also eliminated a key provision that would have allowed Neumann's wife, Rebekah, to lead the search for his successor should he ever become permanently disabled or deceased. Instead, WeWork's board would pick a successor. The filing states that "no members of Adam's family will sit on our board."

Neumann has decided to return any profits he receives from the real estate transactions he has entered into with the company, the filing states. He had faced criticism for leasing several properties in which he has an ownership stake back to WeWork and making millions in the process. Neumann will also limit himself to selling no more than 10% of his shareholdings in each of the second and third years after the WeWork IPO.

The startup unicorn free-for-all times are coming to a close...

"Gold certainly welcomed the ECB stimulus," said Craig Erlam, a senior market analyst at Oanda. "Ultimately, global easing like we're seeing now has been bullish for gold and that's exactly what we're seeing right now."

December gold on Comex gained $4.20 an ounce, or 0.3%, to settle at $1,507.40 an ounce ... Silver for December delivery, meanwhile, added nearly a penny, or 0.04%, at $18.177 an ounce...

"Central banks around the world have been easing, and will continue to do so, and that's why gold has been making such strides higher with only modest corrections along the way," Erlam said in a market update.

You might know that I have an opinion that under every eight-year president in the United States, the national debt doubles. It's been that way roughly back to Reagan. So we'll see if that holds true with Trump. He's well on his way

... the interest rate should compensate you for the risk of loaning to the nation. And now those rewards for loaning money have gone down so low that they've actually gone negative where it's a privilege to loan money to a country.

I'm not so sure that in the long run that holds up. But it is the case right now. And I think the U.S. is going to be the next one to follow.''

"Stop the WeWork deal," Cramer said on "Squawk Box." "We don't want that deal. I just wish they would go away."

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"I don't want WeWork at any price," Cramer said. "There are certain deals that can come and they can just really take the air out of any market."

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WeWork's plans to move forward despite the reported advice from its major investor SoftBank, which will likely face a multibillion dollar write down if the company debuts at a valuation between $15 billion and $20 billion. SoftBank invested $2 billion in WeWork in January at a valuation of $47 billion. On Friday, CNBC's David Faber was hearing the valuation could be $15 billion or lower.

It's fascinating and telling that Cramer is mostly interested in the effect on the wider market -- the level of anxiety about keeping the market propped up at all costs has reached a fever pitch.

The ECB reduced the deposit rate to minus 0.5% from minus 0.4%, and said it'll buy debt from Nov. 1 at a pace of 20 billion euros ($22 billion) a month for as long as necessary to hit its inflation goal.

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The ECB changed its guidance on interest rates to say they'll stay at present or lower levels until the outlook for inflation "robustly" converges to its goal of just below 2%. It previously expected borrowing costs to stay unchanged until mid-2020. It also scrapped a 10-basis point rate premium previously attached to its long-term loan program.

The actions prompted U.S. President Donald Trump to tweet that the ECB is "acting quickly" while the Federal Reserve "sits, and sits, and sits." That's in line with his strategy of calling on the Fed to cut rates aggressively. The Fed is likely to lower borrowing costs next week for the second time this year, as central banks around the world ease to combat the spreading weakness.

Apparently no recessions will be allowed. Astounding.

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The average house, referred to locally as a villa, is now trading for less than it did during the darkest days of the global financial crisis and subsequent credit crunch, which hit Dubai the hardest in 2010-11. It's also lower than at any point since oil prices crashed in 2015, according Property Monitor, which is powered by Cavendish Maxwell.

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While the Dubai economy remains relatively robust, powered by nearly 8 million foreign expats who live and work in the city, nonstop building has created a glut of housing that's prevented home values from appreciating in more than a decade.

Sprawling master-planned communities dotted with mansions have been hit the hardest.

"You're seeing it pretty much throughout the world. It's only a matter of time before it's more in the United States," Greenspan told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street" on Wednesday, adding investors should watch the 30-year Treasury yield.

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He added that gold prices have been surging recently because people are looking for "hard" assets they know are going to have value down the road as the population ages. Gold futures are up more than 21% in 2019 and are trading around levels not seen since 2013.

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Sam Zell, who made nearly $6 billion in the commercial real estate business and joined CNBC on Wednesday, slammed WeWork for offering little more than what already exists in the marketplace.

"I had the privilege of investing in this kind of company once before. As a matter of fact, this kind of company began in 1956," when office subletting emerged, Zell said Wednesday. "Every single company in this space has gone broke," he said.

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The new legislation to stop a no-deal Brexit was passed by a vote of 327-299 earlier Wednesday and could now essentially force the prime minister to ask the EU for another delay for the U.K.'s departure, which has a current deadline of October 31. The EU would have to agree to a delay and the bill would also have to be approved by the largely pro-EU House of Lords later this week.''

Last week The Real Deal reported that private equity group Blackstone was "warehousing" vacated apartments and that the issue had prompted the city's housing preservation and development to review its 2015 regulatory agreement with the landlord. As part of that landmark deal, the city provided the owner with $220 million in subsidies, and in return, Blackstone agreed to keep 5,000 of the roughly 11,200 units affordable for a 20-year-span ending in 2035.

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State Assemblymember Harvey Epstein, who represents Stuy Town's district, said he had asked Blackstone about the units and said there was nothing illegal about its actions. He said he believed Blackstone officials were weighing the risk of waiting--perhaps in the hope of a change to the rent laws--versus renting the units now.

"They are making an economic calculation," he said. Nevertheless, he said that given the affordable housing crisis, the city should not allow landlords to keep units off the market.  

Times were tough for growers and ranchers under Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, Fernandez's running mate who was president between 2007 and 2015, when Macri took over.

She curbed exports, capped domestic prices and demonized farmers, grouping them with what she depicted as a greedy clique of businessmen who imperiled her leftist reforms. Her first term was marred by huge protests over taxes on crop shipments.

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Reumann has taken other steps to safeguard his finances. One is conventional enough. He's trying to lock in prices now with buyers for wheat he put in the ground this past winter.

The other appears more unusual, almost desperate. He's only applying a small dose of fertilizer to the wheat. Whatever grows will grow, he figures, but he's not going to spend more money on a crop that Alberto Fernandez, Macri's rival in the Oct. 27 vote, could force him to sell at deeply discounted prices.

"If Fernandez the populist governs, farmers will produce just to subsist," said Juan Ouwerkerk, president of Alfa, a farmers' cooperative in southern Buenos Aires province, Argentina's bread basket. "It could be a train wreck."''