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The state government isn't exactly ignoring the rising water. Governor Ron DeSantis and his administration have attempted to address the havoc caused by the changing climate with his $1.8 billion Resilient Florida Program, an initiative to help communities adapt to sea-level rise and more intense flooding. But the governor has also signed a bill into law that would make the term climate change largely verboten in state statutes. That same bill effectively boosted the use of methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, in Florida by reducing regulations on gas pipelines and increasing protections on gas stoves. In a post on X the day he signed the bill, DeSantis called this "restoring sanity in our approach to energy and rejecting the agenda of the radical green zealots."

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"Why would government employees beat us up? We're only ordinary people asking for our deposits back, we did nothing wrong," the Shandong woman said.

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Some economists have warned that the collapse of Evergrande could become China's "Lehman moment" -- a reference to the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers as a result of the subprime mortgage crisis, which triggered the 2008 global financial crisis.

However, Capital Economics senior global economist Simon MacAdam described that narrative as "wide of the mark."

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The market clout of the indexers raises other questions too. The actual owners of the stocks--not the index-fund managers but the people putting money into index funds--have little say over the companies they own. Vanguard, Fidelity, and State Street, not Mom and Dad, vote in shareholder elections. As John Coates, the Harvard professor, notes: "For the most valuable public company in the world, three individuals can in principle swing the vote of 17 percent of its shares. Generally, a significant fraction of shareholders do not vote, even if in contested battles. As a result, the 17 percent actually represents more like 25 percent or more of the likely votes in contested votes. That share of the vote will generally be pivotal." In fact, the Big Three cast roughly 25 percent of the votes in S&P 500 companies.

Another worry is that these firms are too passive rather than too powerful. They are committed to being as lean and hands-off as possible, in order to reduce their fees. They do not tend to get involved in shareholder actions or small-bore corporate management, perhaps in part because any one company doing well against its peers is not of interest to the indexers, who want more assets under management and higher corporate profits.

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The effect on the real economy might look a lot like that of rising corporate concentration. And the two phenomena might be catalyzing one another, as index investing increases the number of mergers and makes them more lucrative.

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Just last month, Senator Elizabeth Warren grilled Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen on whether BlackRock, with its $9 trillion in assets under management, is too big to fail. The Federal Trade Commission is contemplating whether the big index-fund families pose antitrust concerns. Government watchdogs have raised alarm bells about the revolving door, as the Biden administration continues to draw officials from the Big Three. In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, the chief executive officer of State Street said he thought it was "almost inevitable, when you see this kind of concentration, that it probably will make sense to do something about it."

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Among other things, the [NY Times-leaked] records revealed that Mr. Trump had paid just $750 in federal income taxes in his first year as president and no income taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years. They also showed he had written off $26 million in "consulting fees" as a business expense between 2010 and 2018, some of which appear to have been paid to his older daughter, Ivanka Trump, while she was a salaried employee of the Trump Organization.

The legitimacy of the fees, which reduced Mr. Trump's taxable income, has since become a subject of Mr. Vance's investigation, as well as a separate civil inquiry by Letitia James, the New York attorney general. Ms. James and Mr. Vance are Democrats, and Mr. Trump has sought to portray the multiple inquiries as politically motivated, while denying any wrongdoing.

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The tax returns represent a self-reported accounting of revenues and expenses, and often lack the specificity required to know, for instance, if legal costs related to hush-money payments were claimed as a tax write-off, or if money from Russia ever moved through Mr. Trump's bank accounts. The absence of that level of detail underscores the potential value of other records that Mr. Vance won access to with Monday's Supreme Court decision.

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More broadly, the tax records showed how the public disclosures he filed as a candidate and then as president offered a distorted view of his overall finances by reporting glowing numbers for his golf courses, hotels and other businesses based on the gross revenues they collected each year. The actual bottom line, after losses and expenses, was much gloomier: In 2018, while Mr. Trump's public filings showed $434.9 million in revenue, his tax returns declared a total of $47.4 million in losses.

Those records were obtained despite the Supreme Court having not yet made a decision on whether Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance Jr can demand eight years of Mr Trump's tax records from his accounting firm, Mazars USA.

While the district attorney's office was still waiting for an order from the nation's highest court on its subpoena powers, Bloomberg News reported the new developments meant investigators can begin verifying criminal allegations against the Trump Organization and former president.

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A spokesperson for Morgan Lewis said the global law firm was ending its relationship with Mr Trump and his business, which predated his 2015 presidential bid, according to The American Lawyer.

All it needed was arson to become a Reichstag moment.

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Early Thursday morning, an exhausted Congress finally finished its business and certified Biden as the next president. It was not a display of unity in the face of historic attack, however. Even with the chaos fresh in their minds, Trump's enablers continued to push the lie that he had been cheated out of victory, and they contested the certification of electors from several states. Yes, a few Republican senators and House members abandoned this folly in the wake of the violence it helped trigger, but the vast majority did not, including House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Bakersfield). And those who did have a change of heart still bear responsibility for their role in feeding the atmosphere of lies in the first place.

It was as though they view the election process as nothing more than a game, or a process to be manipulated with no concern for the consequences.

Britain's services sector -- encompassing not only London's powerful financial industry, but also lawyers, architects, consultants and others -- was largely left out of the 1,246-page deal, despite the sector accounting for 80 percent of British economic activity.

The deal also did little to assuage European migrants, some of whom left Britain during the pandemic and are now struggling to determine whether they need to rush back to establish a right to settle in Britain before the split is finalized on Dec. 31.

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Negotiators have not formally published the voluminous trade deal, though both sides have offered summaries, leaving analysts and ordinary citizens uncertain about some details even as lawmakers in Britain and Europe prepare to vote on it in a matter of days.

But it had long been clear that the agreement would offer the City of London, a hub for international banks, asset managers, insurance firms and hedge funds, few assurances about future trade across the English Channel. Britain sells roughly 30 billion pounds, or $40 billion, of financial services to the European Union each year, profiting from an integrated market that makes it easier in some cases to sell services from one member country to another than it is to sell services from one American state to another.

The new trade deal does smooth the flow of goods across British borders. But it leaves financial firms without the biggest benefit of European Union membership: the ability to easily offer services to clients across the region from a single base. This has long allowed a bank in London to provide loans to a business in Venice, or trade bonds for a company in Madrid.

That loss is especially painful for Britain, which ran a surplus of £18 billion, or $24 billion, on trade in financial and other services with the European Union in 2019, but a deficit of £97 billion, or $129 billion, on trade in goods.

"The result of the deal is that the European Union retains all of its current advantages in trading, particularly with goods, and the U.K. loses all of its current advantages in the trade for services," said Tom Kibasi, the former director of the Institute for Public Policy Research, a research institute. "The outcome of this trade negotiation is precisely what happens with most trade deals: The larger party gets what it wants and the smaller party rolls over."

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After Jan. 1, the sale of services, once assured, will hang on patchwork decisions by European regulators about whether Britain's new financial regulations are close enough to their own to be trusted. While London's expertise is difficult to match, putting its financial and service firms in a strong position to weather the storm, some obstacles are inevitable. Already, Britons living in Europe who have bank accounts in Britain have been told their accounts will be closed.

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In announcing the trade deal this week, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain acknowledged it offered "not as much" access for financial firms "as we would have liked." But he was not as straightforward about the difficulties facing even British retailers under the deal, analysts said.

In promising that there were "no non-tariff barriers" to selling goods after Brexit, he ignored the tens of millions of customs declarations, health assessments and other checks that businesses will now be responsible for.

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Next to a no-deal split, involving enormous logjams at the borders and deep uncertainty for businesses, the agreement was a salve. But even with such a deal, the path forward is uncertain.

"That period of ‘let's just put a Band-Aid on it' is more or less coming to a conclusion," says Wendy Silverstein, a former executive with Vornado Realty Trust and WeWork who recently started a restructuring and advisory firm. "There's a lot of collateral damage that's going to be hanging around for a while."

That damage has the potential to ripple far beyond building owners and their tenants. Commercial property underpins the tax base in many cities across the U.S., and a downturn could pummel local budgets. As loan losses mount, the slump could also put stress on the banking system. The Federal Reserve singled out commercial real estate in its most recent Financial Stability Report as showing particular signs of weakness.

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[But] even as an onslaught of distressed debt looms, there's plenty of capital to chase deals. Private real estate debt funds raised $10.7 billion in the third quarter, the most of any strategy, according to Preqin, while North American real estate funds for all types of investment were sitting on almost $200 billion in dry powder in December.

All that money may limit how far commercial real estate prices fall. Congress's new Covid relief agreement, which allows banks and other lenders until the end of next year to work with delinquent borrowers, also could give businesses more time to stay afloat. And by mid-2021, widespread vaccinations may allow consumers to finally escape from home and return with open wallets to hotels and malls. As Richard Barkham, chief economist for CBRE, put it: "We're entering the dark before the dawn."

But wait, it gets worse. What if a business's loan hasn't been forgiven? Then surely those expenses are deductible as usual, right? Well, not necessarily. The IRS ruled in November that if a PPP borrower "reasonably expects to receive forgiveness," then the borrower "may not deduct those expenses" in the year they were paid.

None of this appears to be what Congress intended when it hurriedly passed the CARES Act. But without a fix, "millions of small businesses...will face a surprising, and, in many cases, insurmountable tax bill next year," the trade associations say.

Help may be on the way in the $908 billion bipartisan stimulus proposal gaining traction in Washington, but it's impossible to be sure. The negotiators have released only a vague outline of the proposal, mentioning "deductibility" in connection with PPP. In any case, it's all subject to change in the inevitable horse-trading going on behind the scenes.

Beside the sledgehammer threat of the PPP tax issue, several other emergency programs for small businesses are scheduled to expire at year-end unless Congress extends them. For many small-business owners, it's still uncertain just how bad 2020 will be.

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In other words, Trump is on the hook for a lot of money that he may have to scramble to repay in a Covid-19-battered economy in which his industries -- hotels, leisure, urban real estate -- have been particularly pummeled. Forbes estimates his assets are worth $3.7 billion; Bloomberg News pegs them at about $3.2 billion. He's not going broke. But if the economy continues to struggle in coming months, those valuations will be tested. And much of what Trump holds isn't liquid, meaning he may be hard-pressed to sell assets quickly if he needs to raise funds. Among Trump's most valuable holdings, for example, are minority stakes in two properties controlled by Vornado Realty Trust. Rumors of fire sales might further depress the value of his portfolio.

Another thing that would weaken Trump's ability to negotiate sweetheart financial deals or forgiveness: leaving the presidency.

On the legal side of the ledger, Trump, his children and their company face aggressive investigations into their finances, accounting practices and tax payments.