Business

S&P500 futures have started the second half solidly in the green, up 0.3% to 2,429, tracking European markets broadly in the green, while Asian stocks fell slightly and crude oil is little changed. With US markets set to close at 1pm today trading volumes in many markets remain light before Tuesday’s July 4th holiday and as investors await Friday’s report on the American jobs market. Traders will be looking at key upcoming economic data for validation of the hawkish shift from central banks that roiled markets last week. 

With Illinois, which on Saturday morning entered its third fiscal year without a budget, facing a catastrophic downgrade, late on Sunday evening the Illinois House approved the most controversial element of a budget package, a tax hike which will increase the income tax rate by 32% from 3.75% to 4.95%, and the corporate income tax rate from 5.25% to 7%, to try and end a historic budget impasse. The bill passed 72-45. The House also approved a $36 billion spending plan minutes later on a 81-34 vote.

Via Jesse's Cafe Americain blog,

History may not repeat... but it sure ryhmes...

The State of Delaware just took a historic step toward ensuring that US stock exchanges will soon be violently disrupted by blockchain technology - possibly to the extent of being rendered obsolete. CoinDesk reports that lawmakers in the state’s general assembly passed a law that makes explicit the right to trade stocks on a blockchain. Details of the bill are still emerging. One source indicated that the bill passed with near unanimity, with a single vote against.

Two weeks after Deutsche Bank’s whimsical, James Joycean derivatives strategist, Aleksandar Kocic disaggregated the market’s current sweeping complacency regime in a florid stream-of-consciousness report, and warning that the market's current "metastability" would lead to "cataclysmic events", with a crash becomes increasingly more likely the longer price discovery in the market (one not propped up by Federal Reserve) is delayed, in his latest note from this week he takes on a more practical - if just as abstract - target; quantifying complacency, both in a market sense and as a metaphysica