Business

Back in July, the state of Illinois narrowly avoided a junk bond rating with a last minute budget deal that included a 32% in hike in income taxes.  Republican Governor Bruce Rauner vetoed the budget and called it a "disaster," but both houses of the state legislature voted to override his veto.  Meanwhile, S&P and Moody's were apparently both convinced that the budget deal was sufficient for the state to remain an investment grade credit and all lived happily ever after, if just for a few months.  Per CNN:

After claiming its 27th victim of the year in the form of the Toys 'R' Us bankruptcy filed earlier this morning, the Amazon-induced retail bloodbath of 2017 has just turned full-on apocalyptic.  According to data aggregated by Reorg First Day, the Toys "R" Us filing brings the total amount of defaulted retail debt to over $14 billion so far in 2017. 

All of which should be sufficient to drive U.S. equity markets to fresh new highs before the end of the day.

One week ago we said that Category 1 storm clouds are gathering over what has traditionally been one of the most lucrative, and perhaps only profitable, sectors to come out of Silicon Valley in decades: online advertising. We directed readers' attention to the recent Global Retailing Conference organized by Goldman Sachs, in which Restoration Hardware's delightfully colorful CEO, Gary Friedman, divulged the following striking anecdote about the company's online marketing strategy, and the state of online ad spending in general. What Friedman revealed - in brief - was the following:

Back in March, when we detailed the ongoing catastrophic deterioration in the US retail sector, manifesting itself in empty malls, mass store closures, soaring layoffs and growing bankruptcies - demonstrated most vividly by the overnight bankruptcy of Toys "R" Us, the second largest retail bankruptcy in US history after K-Mart - we said that "just like 10 years ago, when the "big short" was putting on the RMBX trade, and to a smaller extent, its cousin the CMBX, so now too some are starting to short CMBS through the CMBX, a CDS index which tracks the values of bonds backed

Authored by Nick Cunningham via OilPrice.com,

The oil market has been awash in crude for more than three years, and OPEC has struggled to accelerate the rebalancing effort, but the world could be heading for a supply crunch in a few years due to the sharp fall in industry spending.