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Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump 8m8 minutes ago Masa (SoftBank) of Japan has agreed to invest $50 billion in the U.S. toward businesses and 50,000 new jobs....

The euro slid in Asia on Monday after exit polls showed Italian Prime Minster Matteo Renzi clearly losing a constitutional referendum that could end his career and destabilize the country's shaky banking system. The single currency dropped to $1.0577 in thin trade, after starting around $1.0645 earlier. The dollar was underpinned by expectations of a U.S. rate rise this month, and even held its ground on the safe-haven yen at 113.20. Dealers said Italian bonds were set to come under pressure as top-rated U.S. Treasuries and German bunds gained. Asian investors are often reluctant to trade on European developments, preferring...

Media reports of Agustin Carstens resignation as chief of Mexico’s central bank have left MSM pundits and even business analysts scratching their heads. It appears no-one has any idea why Carstens is leaving… well, almost no-one.

There is a lot of talk out there about the auto-loan market right now. Hedge fund manager Jim Chanos has said the auto-lending market should "scare the heck out of everybody," while the auto-lending practices of some used-car dealerships has been given the John Oliver treatment on TV. It's a topic we've been paying attention to as well. In a presentation in September at the Barclays Financial Services Conference, Gordon Smith, the chief executive for consumer and community banking at JPMorgan, set out some eye-opening statistics on the market. Now the New York Federal Reserve is taking a closer look...

Donald Trump met with former banker John Allison (shown) on Monday in a meeting that was largely ignored by the mainstream media. It remains unclear whether Allison was being interviewed for the job of secretary of the Treasury or was just giving Trump some advice from a free market perspective.Either way, it’s a breath of fresh air in an era where statism and excessive hubris (the idea that mere politicians and economists can guide, even stimulate a $20-trillion-dollar economy with monetary policy) has reigned for decades.Right after graduating Phi Beta Kappa from the University of North Carolina in 1971, Allison joined...

The tiny Pacific island of Nauru has spent weeks completely cut off from the outside world after its telecommunications network collapsed. Its isolation is so complete that no one is even sure who the country's president is any more. Nauru, an isolated speck in the southwest Pacific with a population of 12,000, is in a "critical situation", according to the last message received by the outside world. That came via an address given three weeks ago by the man last believed to be running the country, President Bernard Dowiyogo, details of which were given on Friday by Radio Australia....

Even though disgraced Wells Fargo CEO John Stumpf has left the building, his most outrageous legal theories live on: on Wednesday, the company filed a motion in a federal court in Utah seeking dismissal of a class action suit by the customers it defrauded -- the bank argues that since customers sign a binding arbitration "agreement" when they open new accounts, that the customers whose signatures were forged on fraudulent new accounts should be subject to this agreement and denied a day in court. REPORT THIS AD This is the same argument that Stumpf made during his disastrous performance in...

A drop in millionaires in Switzerland this year has failed to significantly dent the country’s impressive wealth, as a report by Credit Suisse declares it the richest country in the world yet again. The Global Wealth Report 2016, published on Tuesday by the Swiss bank’s Research Institute, said Switzerland had an average wealth per person of $561,900 in 2016, making Swiss adults 11 times richer than the average world citizen. However Switzerland’s average wealth in 2016 was slightly down on last year’s figure of $567,100. The country experienced the second biggest drop in wealth per adult behind the UK, meaning...

"He finally broke and he walked them through what he had done. "They totted up his losses and by Sunday night they worked out that the losses were about £1.2 billion. The bank's bosses decided it had to cancel the bets immediately when the markets opened on Monday. "They started unwinding them on Monday morning - but because the market was failing the £1.2 billion loss became a £3.7 billion loss." Some senior City figures said the "positions" were so huge that dumping them on one day could have been enough to trigger Monday's stock market meltdown, the worst since...

The soon-to-be White House chief strategist laid out a global vision in a rare 2014 talk, one where he said racism in the far right gets “washed out” and called Vladimir Putin a kleptocrat. BuzzFeed News publishes the complete transcript for the first time.

Jamie Dimon likes to write grandiose letters to shareholders. Unfortunately, the financial media sees fit to treat them seriously. And his minders manage to save him from himself. Right after the crisis, DimonÂ’s annual missive contained an section praising the heroics of his staff, comparing them at length to the soldiers at Iowa Jima. Dimon was persuaded to get rid of that bit only because his outside PR firm threatened to quit. This yearÂ’s letter, as recapped by the Financial Times, is every bit as exaggerated, although less obviously so to the outsider. The theme this year is why too...

The British spy whose body was found padlocked inside a bag in his flat had illegally hacked into secret data on former U.S. president Bill Clinton, it has been revealed. Gareth Williams, 31, was discovered in a holdall in the bath at his London home five years ago this month, but the mystery surrounding his death has never been solved. Today, it has been revealed the spy had dug out a guest list for an event Clinton was due to attend as a favour for a friend. The hack breached Mr Williams' security clearance and this sparked anger among MI6...

Every time Democratic U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky mentions "Republicans" and "scandal" and "accountability," she'll be sticking her husband's foot in her mouth. The foot I'm talking about belongs to her spousal unit, Robert Creamer, the noted champion of the poor and the downtrodden and Democratic political organizer. Creamer's judge was U.S. District Court Judge James Moran, the former Democratic state legislator from Evanston. Moran's son-in-law is Democratic political consultant Peter Giangreco, who has worked politics with Creamer and Schakowsky and had a seat on the board of one of Creamer's many organizations. Judge Moran says he thought about recusing himself...

RT UK’s bank accounts have been blocked, RT’s editor-in-chief reported. The National Westminster Bank has informed RT UK that it will no longer have the broadcaster among its clients. The bank provided no explanation for the decision. “We have recently undertaken a review of your banking arrangements with us and reached the conclusion that we will no longer provide these facilities,” NatWest said in a letter to RT’s London office. The bank said that the entire Royal Bank of Scotland Group, of which NatWest is part of, would refuse to service RT. More in linkhttps://www.rt.com/news/363013-rt-uk-accounts-blocked/ Bank accounts of Russian state...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The United States moved Wednesday to recover more than $1 billion that federal officials say was stolen from a Malaysian economic development fund and that was used for high-end real estate, fancy artwork and production of the Hollywood film, "The Wolf of Wall Street." The diverted funds paid for luxury properties in New York and California, a $35 million private jet and expensive paintings by Vincent Van Gogh and Claude Monet, according to federal government complaints that demand the recovery and forfeiture of the ill-gotten assets. The complaints, filed in Los Angeles, allege a complex money laundering...

<p>A Qatar native held on charges of lying to the FBI in an investigation into the September 11 attacks was designated yesterday as an "enemy combatant" and could be tried before a military tribunal for helping al Qaeda operatives relocate in the United States. Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri, 37, in Justice Department custody since late 2001, was given the new designation by President Bush and handed over to the Defense Department.</p>

<p>Bank of America has a recession warning that's downright 'scary'</p> <p>There's a chilling trend in the market, and it could wreak havoc on your portfolio, a top market watcher said.</p> <p>"We are seven years into a full-fledged, all out, central bankers doing everything they can to stimulate demand," Bank of America-Merrill Lynch's head of U.S. equity and quantitative strategy Savita Subramanian recently warned on CNBC's " Fast Money ."</p>

The world is swimming in a record $152 trillion in debt, the IMF said on Wednesday, even as the institution encourages some countries to spend more to boost flagging growth if they can afford it. Global debt, both public and private, reached 225 percent of global economic output last year, up from about 200 percent in 2002, the IMF said in its new Fiscal Monitor report. The IMF said about two thirds of the 2015 total, or about $100 billion, is owed by private sector borrowers, and noted that rapid increases in private debt often lead to financial crises. While...

World finance leaders on Thursday decried a growing populist backlash against globalization and pledged to take steps to ensure trade and economic integration benefited more people currently left behind. Their comments at the start of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank fall meetings signaled frustration with persistently low growth rates and the surge of public anger over free trade and other pillars of the global economic system. The meetings are the first since Britain voted in June to leave the European Union and U.S. billionaire Donald Trump secured the Republican presidential nomination with a campaign that attacked trade deals....

This is getting to be a habit. Previous late summer holidays by this correspondent coincided with the run on Northern Rock, and subsequently with the failure of Lehman Brothers. So the final crawl towards the probable nationalisation of Deutsche Bank came as no particular surprise this year, but it is tiresome to relate nevertheless. The 2015 annual report for Deutsche Bank runs to some 448 pages, so one rather doubts if even its CEO, John Cryan, has read it all, or has a complete grasp of, for example, its €42 trillion in total notional derivatives exposure. Is Deutsche Bank technically...