United States

With Amazon having an exponentially growing (if mostly part-time) work force, which as of Q3 amounted to just shy of 320,000 employees...

... not to mention a surging robotic support base, on Thursday the rapidly growing internet retailer issued a press release stating it "plans to create an additional 100,000 full-time, full-benefit jobs in the U.S. over the next 18 months."  Of course, it is likely that Amazon would have added that number of jobs anyway, simply by extrapolating its current growth rate.

Risk assets declined across the globe, with European, Asian shares and S&P 500 futures all falling, while the dollar slumped against most currencies after a news conference by President-elect Donald Trump disappointed investors with limited details of his economic-stimulus plans, and the Trumpflation/reflation trade was said to be unwinding.

Submitted by 720Global's Michael Lebowitz via RealInvestmentAdvice.com,

The FBI’s latest release of Hillary Clinton emails make it clear that the former Secretary of State committed espionage against the United States.  According  Senior Judicial Analyst for Fox News, Judge Napolitano, both Congress and the FBI now have enough evidence against Clinton to resume pursuing criminal charges against her. Washingtontimes.com reports: On July 5, FBI Director James Comey announced publicly that the FBI would recommend against seeking an indictment of Mrs. Clinton for espionage — the failure to safeguard state secrets that had been entrusted to her.

Submitted by Gail Tverberg via Our Finite World blog,

Some people would argue that 2016 was the year that the world economy started to come apart, with the passage of Brexit and the election of Donald Trump. Whether or not the “coming apart” process started in 2016, in my opinion we are going to see many more steps in this direction in 2017. Let me explain a few of the things I see.