United States

Credit-reporting company Equifax shocked investors, and more than a third of America, when it announced on Thursday afternoon that hackers had breached its data systems, compromising the personal information of approximately 143 million U.S. consumers. The information accessed "primarily includes names, Social Security numbers, birth dates, addresses and, in some instances, driver’s license numbers." In other words, pretty much everything that should have been hidden behind an n-number of firewalls, is now available to the dark net's highest bidder. 

Only a few days ago, Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that the US and North Korea were “on the verge of a large-scale conflict,” seeming to imply that a war – possibly more than just conventional – was inevitable, as North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un would never shutter the country’s nuclear program, according to Russia Today.

Today, in what appears to be a reversal, Putin – speaking at an economic forum in Vladivostok on Thursday - cautioned that there would be no conflict involving nuclear weapons in northeast Asia.

Following Facebook’s “bombshell” revelation last night that Russian-backed entities purchased more than $100,000 in political advertising on its platform, Congressional Democrats and their compatriots in the “resistance” have been howling that the company's admission represents incontrovertible proof that Russia successfully managed to sway the US presidential election.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The American Dream blog,

S&P futures are flat, still spooked by the WSJ's report that Gary Cohn will not be the next Fed chair, while both European stocks and Asian shares gain in a overnight session on edge in which everyone is looking forward to today's main risk event: the ECB meeting and Draghi press conference due in under two hours. The dollar continued to weaken against most G-10 peers as tensions over North Korea, concerns over Stan Fischer's resignation and the increasingly cloudy Fed outlook outweighed positive sentiment from the US debt ceiling extension.