United States

There was a time in American history when apartment living, particularly in the suburbs, was reserved for 20-something year olds who were happy to look beyond the cramped spaces and odorous carpets of multi-family housing units in their quest for cheap housing and freedom from the parental units.  But, as the Rent Cafe Blog points out, Baby Boomers are increasingly giving up their participation in America's perpetually re-inflating housing bubbles and opting instead to return to the smaller living accommodations of their youth.

Shares of cryptocurrency pioneer Overstock.com climbed more than 5% on Tuesday after the company revealed that it will launch an ICO on Nov. 1 using its proprietary tZERO platform, a strategy that will allow Overstock to raise capital without diluting its float.

As far as we can tell, the Overstock ICO would be the first conducted by a large, publicly traded US company, and could potentially open the door for other corporations to utilize the ICO as an alternative means of raising capital.

The offering will will run through Nov. 15, Overstock said.

Authored by Patrick Buchanan via Buchanan.org,

“The Kurds have no friends but the mountains,” is an old lament. Last week, it must have been very much on Kurdish minds.

As their U.S. allies watched, the Kurdish peshmerga fighters were run out of Kirkuk and all the territory they had captured fighting ISIS alongside the Americans. The Iraqi army that ran them out was trained and armed by the United States.

Via VariantPerception.com,

In August, we had reviewed a few charts showing that US high yield valuations were divorced from fundamentals, as well as to other yield products. This week, refreshing those charts, we can see that things are just as bad.

The top-left chart shows that US high yield spreads are diverging from the tightening of bank lending standards relative to credit demand.

 

European shares are modestly lower as investors monitor tense events in Spain and as focus turns to Thursday’s ECB meeting; US equity futures have rebounded from yesterday's sharp but shallow selloff and are in the green amid rising odds of U.S. tax reform and the imminent unveiling of the next Fed chair while Asian shares rise and Japan extends its winning streak to a record 16 days. The euro edged higher after data showed Europe’s economy is maintaining momentum, while the USDJPY managed to recover all of yesterday's sharp losses.