Business

Following the 'successful' launch of Bitcoin futures overnight, Interactive Brokers - whose founder had been adamantly against the CME/CBOE product over risk concerns - has enabled clients to trade the crypto-craziness on its platform... but with some notable constraints.

Interactive Brokers began offering clients the ability to trade bitcoin futures at the start of trading on the Cboe Futures Exchange (CFE) on Sunday night, December 10th, 2017.

Unlike last month's ugly 3Y auction, today's just concluded sale of $24 billion in 3 year paper was stellar, stopping through the When Issued 1.934% by 0.2bps, a surge in buyside demand as the Bid to Cover jumped from 2.76 to 3.15, the highest since September 2015, while Indirect Bidders took down the most since August.

The details: the high yield was 1.932% vs six previous auction average 1.572%, it stopped through the WI of 1.394%.

The Bid-to- cover was 3.15, up from 2.76 in October, and well above the previous six auction average of 2.88.

Following the discovery of a "small hairline crack" in The Forties Pipeline System - one of the most important oil conduits in the world - its operator Ineos has decided a total controlled shutdown "for weeks, not days" is the safest option. This has sent the spread between WTI and Brent soaring...

Authored by John Rubino via DollarCollapse.com,

Each quarter, Credit Bubble Bulletin’s Doug Noland posts a “flow of funds” report that analyzes the debt and securities markets data released by the Fed in its Z.1 Report. It’s always shocking to see the numbers we’re dealing with, but even more so lately as history’s biggest financial bubble starts to dwarf its predecessors.

As the House and Senate continue to try to reconcile their two versions of a tax plan, the taxing structure for pass-through entities (s-corps, LLC's, etc.) continues to be somewhat controversial, if not completely nonsensical. As we pointed out last week, the Senate bill somewhat randomly chose to exclude pass-through entities organized as family trusts from tax cuts which would ultimately leave them on the hook for much larger tax bills due to the elimination of other deductions.