Business

Tuesday’s meeting of the Uber Inc. board – the first following Kalanick’s unilateral decision to appoint former Xerox Corp. Chairwoman and CEO Ursula Burns and former Merrill Lynch Chairman and CEO John Thain – appears to have been a productive one.

Reuters is reporting that the board voted to move ahead with two issues, a change in governance rules, and an investment by Japan’s Softbank Group, which it was reported last month has been in talks to invest as much as $10 billion in the cash-burning ride-share giant.

Even in a time when retail investors are (almost) literally throwing money at ETFs, and the passive industry is growing by billions of dollars each day at the expense of active managed funds, there are occasional casualties, and on Tuesday afternoon it was Dennis Gartman's turn. According to AdvisorShares, which offers 18 ETFs with $1.1 billion of assets under management, the ETF administrator has begun the process of closing two Gartman ETF products, the Gartman Gold/Euro ETF (NYSE Arca: GEUR) and the AdvisorShares Gartman Gold/Yen ETF (NYSE Arca: GYEN).

Summer closed in a whirlwind of weather chaos for the United States and its territories. At the start of the summer, two obvious signs that the US economy was flying apart emerged -- the big blowouts in the auto industry and in retail . I found it helpful to take a review of what summer brought:

Carmageddon crashes on

The auto industry began a decline similar to the one we experienced at the start of the Great Recession. (See “Carmageddon Crashes into ‘the Recovery’ Right on Schedule.”)

Authored by Wolf Richter via WolfStreet.com,

US Treasury Yield v. Euro “Junk Bond” Yield. A new record in central-bank engineered absurdity. 

Authored by Steve H. Hanke of the Johns Hopkins University. Follow him on Twitter @Steve_Hanke.

The Grim Reaper has taken his scythe to the Venezuelan bolivar. The death of the bolivar is depicted in the following chart. A bolivar is worthless, and with its collapse, Venezuela is witnessing the world’s worst inflation.