"After Ireland, the Dutch economy is most entwined with that of the UK," she said, citing fisheries, meat-processing and flower exports. She warned that many small and medium enterprises had failed to make sufficient preparation for a no-deal Brexit.

...

Germany's foreign minister, Heiko Maas, said on Thursday that plans for a disorderly Brexit would have to be stepped up.

"In the coming days and weeks, we will do everything we can so that Britain exits with and not without an agreement," he told the Bundestag (German parliament).

Spain said on Thursday that staffing of immigration offices would be beefed up if the UK left the EU without a deal. Some 310,000 UK citizens live in Spain and they would have to confirm their residency under a no-deal Brexit, officials said.''

... 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.)

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.

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.

But San Francisco-ization and the other -izations don't refer to the process of acquiring any of these good things. Rather, those terms capture the deepening suspicion of many communities that the costs of urban prosperity outweigh the benefits. The tech jobs and the high wages aren't worth having if they come with worsening congestion, more crowded development or soaring housing costs.

...

Embedded in these fears is something slippery, seemingly inevitable. Once you let tech giants in the door, you have a homeless crisis. Once you allow more density, you're surrounded by skyscrapers. Once housing costs begin to rise, the logical conclusion is San Francisco.

...

It's much harder to point to cities that have gotten all of this right -- the growth without the congestion, the tech jobs without the homeless crisis, the affordable housing without the sprawl.

We could use a word for the condition of becoming such a place. Maybe Minneapolisization?

Yet as the shutdown moves through its 10th day, it is clear that the House Democrats' plan to take the first legislative action since the start of the shuttering of roughly a quarter of the federal government remains a nonstarter for Republicans, who still control the chamber on the other side of the US Capitol.

...

Democrats believe it's smart to separate Department of Homeland Security funding -- and the wall fight -- from the other six bills because they think it puts Trump and the Republicans in the position of holding the other agencies and furloughed workers hostage for the wall, the aide said. Democrats believe pressure will mount on Republicans as the shutdown drags on, the aide said.

The negotiations on a deal to open the government have sat frozen for days, according to people involved, as lawmakers in the House and Senate have deserted the Capitol for the holidays and, with no votes scheduled, likely won't return until the start of the next Congress. That, according to several aides involved in the process, has been viewed as the unofficial moment talks may begin, but there still remains no clear pathway forward for an agreement.