America

The need for consolidation in the face of the ongoing Amazon - and broader online menace - is becoming irresistible, even for the biggest and best mall operators. Today the French-based Unibail-Rodamco, the biggest commercial landlord in Europe, agreed to purchase Westfield, the Australian-based mall operator. Unibail is offering 0.018844 shares and $2.67 cash for each Westfield share – a 65/35 stock/cash ratio – which values Westfield at an enterprise value of $24.7 billion. Westfield owns 35 shopping malls in the UK and US and is building a new mall in the Italian city of Milan.

E-mini futures are modestly in the green this morning, though net of fair value the S&P index is poised for another record high open as the FOMC begins its last meeting for 2017 in which it is expected to raise rates by 25bps. European stocks gain while Asian equities slide led by weakness in Chinese airplane stocks.

Authored by James Bovard via TheHill.com,

Politifact delivered a “pants on fire” slam to Fox News on Friday because one of its commentators asserted that the Federal Bureau of Investigation “has become America's secret police.”

The FBI has legions of new champions nowadays among liberals and Democrats who hope that its probes will end Donald Trump’s presidency.

This is a stunning reversal that may have J. Edgar Hoover spinning in his grave.

House Republicans successfully managed to kick the can down the road (if only for two weeks) when they managed to pass a two-week extension last week of the continuing resolution that had been funding the government since September.

With Donald Trump's historic tax reform on the verge of passage, and with the Fed continuing its rate hiking cycle so far undeterred, and according to the Fed's own dot plot still having another 7-8 rate hikes to go, China is getting nervous because, as the WSJ reports, it fears "a double whammy sapping money out of China by making the U.S. a more attractive place to invest." In other words, those capital outflows which China was confident it had finally bottled up, are about to return. And that's even as the U.S.