presidential election

With both the S&P, and global stock markets, closing last week at new all time highs, it is safe to say that any and all warnings about "froth", and perhaps a bubble in the market, as Deutsche Bank characterized it last week have been ignored. And yet, as Goldman's economist team writes over the weekend, the recent rise in warnings about "risk levels" and asset prices by Fed officials is concerning: "Fed officials have expressed greater concern about asset prices and financial stability risk recently, a change from their more relaxed view last fall.

The efforts of top Federal Election Commission Democrat, Ellen Weintraub, to demand an inquisition into the potential coordination with Russians of conservative news outlets like Infowars, Breitbart and the Drudge Report, have been dashed as The Federal Election Commission (FEC) has declined her proposal, stating it "cannot support proposals that would burden the free speech rights of American citizens based on incomplete information about foreign activities in the 2016 election."

Authored by Jeffrey Snider via Alhambra Investment Partners,

Repeating what Russian diplomats said informally at the start of the week, the Russian foreign ministry said on Friday that "too many American spies operated in Moscow" under diplomatic cover and warned it might expel some of them to retaliate against Washington's December 2016 expulsion of 35 Russian diplomats.

Just when you thought the Don Jr. story was starting to fizzle, due to revelations which would suggest that nothing of substance was discussed in his meeting with the now infamous Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, NBC News has just dropped a new "bombshell" detail that the heretofore unknown, and quite 'mysterious', third-party that attended that meeting with Veselnitskaya was none other than a Soviet-born counter intelligence officer.