Authored by Hal Snarr via The Mises Institute,
The Federal Reserve’s latest Survey of Consumer Finances, according to Federal Reserve Governor Brainard, shows that the share of income held by the top 1 percent of households has risen from 17 percent in 1988 to 24 percent in 2015, and that the wealth held by that same group rose from 30 percent in 1989 to 39 percent in 2016.
The legacy of the soon-to-retire PBoC governor, Zhou Xiochuan, will be that in sharp contrast to his western brethren, he warned that China’s credit bubble would burst before the fact. Two weeks ago, Zhou warned during the Party Congress that China’s financial system could be heading for a “Minsky moment” due to high levels of corporate debt and rapidly rising household debt (see here).
A flood of new apartments in Manhattan are finally starting to take their toll on a subsection of NYC real estate that had remained quite resilient up until now. As Bloomberg points out this morning, with rent concessions now being offered on 35% of high-end apartments in the Big Apple, the median rent for non-doormen buildings fell in October for the first time in 20 months.
There was something poetically ironic about last night's 800+ point crash in the Nikkei...
... which was saved in the last minutes of trading by what was rumored to be the latest blatant BOJ intervention: it took place right after the month in which a record number of foreigners rushed into Japanese stocks, chasing the record momentum of the Nikkei and Topix.
According to the latest data from the Japanese MOF, in October foreigners made the largest investments ever in Japanese equities in October.
Monsanto thought they had developed an amazing scheme to corner the Midwest farming market when they developed new genetically engineered seeds that were resistant to their new herbicide called dicamba. The resistance of Monsanto's new magical seed crops to dicamba meant that the herbicide could be sprayed liberally by farmers to eradicate weeds and boost yields.