United States

While central banks step away from the spotlight, as does Asian data and markets with China and South Korea both taking a weeklong break, there will be a bevy of central bank speakers to "explain" what is going on while it will be a busy week data wise, with the US employment trade balance report due this week, PMI and retail sales in Euro area, as well as PMI and house prices in UK. The key central bank events include the Australia RBA board meeting, ECB minutes,Yellen and Fed member speeches. In Emerging Markets, there are monetary policy meetings in India, Poland and Romania.

In a fascinating report that provides a glimpse into the shadowy North Korean black-market economy, the Washington Post has published a story about a 2016 incident in which Egyptian authorities intercepted a North Korean ship bearing a Cambodian flag after being alerted by US authorities. After searching the ship, Egyptian law enforcement discovered something unexpected: a trove of nearly 24,000 rocket launchers, and components for 6,000 more weapons, hidden below a large pile of loose iron ore.

While S&P futures were modestly higher, rising 0.1% in a quiet session in which China, South Korea, India and Hong Kong were closed for holidays, the Euro, Spanish stocks and bonds were broadly lower as Spain faces its worst constitutional crisis in years following a dramatic, violent crackdown on Sunday's Catalan independence referendum in which 89% of the voters wanted to secede from Spain.

After the quietest September in history for U.S. stocks...

Things may about to get a little more exciting - entering the final months of 2017, that last digit doesn’t bode well, if history is any indication.

As Bloomberg reports, some of the biggest fourth-quarter declines in the Dow Jones Industrial Average have occurred in years ending in seven, the worst being in a Black-Monday plagued 1987.

Nearly two years after we first observed that Vancouver's soaring real estate market is nothing but a bubbling melange of criminal Chinese oligarch "hot money", desperate to get parked offshore in any piece of real estate, but mostly in British Columbia regardless of price, a new multi-year investigation has uncovered extensive links - including money laundering and underground banking - between China's criminal underworld and British Columbia drug and casino cash and VIPs, as well as their connections to China, Macau and the notorious triads.