Personal Spending, Income Miss Expectations

American consumers edged up their spending in September at the slowest pace since January, suggesting slowing job creation and economic turmoil overseas may be introducing some caution into purchasing habits.

Personal spending, which measures how much Americans paid for everything from sofas to taxi rides, rose 0.1% in September from a month earlier, the Commerce Department said Friday. Consumption climbed 0.4% in August and 0.3% in July.

Personal income, reflecting Americans' pretax earnings from salaries and investments, climbed 0.1% in September. That was the smallest increase since March 2015.  Read more

Icahn Sees 'Grave Risk' to US as Pfizer Looks to Move Offshore

Carl Icahn, the billionaire investor who Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump wants to name Secretary of the Treasury, is urging Congress to change the tax code so that companies don't have an incentive to move outside the U.S.

His latest warning followed confirmed merger talks between Pfizer Inc., the largest U.S. drugmaker, and Ireland-based Allergan Plc. The companies have a combined market value of about $320 billion, which would be a record-breaking deal for the pharmaceutical industry.  Read more

Gallup Poll: Blacks Worse Off Now Than in Obama's First Term

African Americans say that their lives are worse off during President Barack Obama's second term than during his first four years in the White House, a new Gallup Poll released Thursday says.
In a "well-being" poll conducted by Gallup and Healthways, Americans were asked whether they considered themselves as "thriving," "struggling" or "suffering" based on a numbered scale.

Their responses were then averaged on a percentage basis. They were asked these questions earlier this year and in 2012.  Read more

Europe's Last Dictator Has Become the Darling of the Bond Market

He’s known as Europe’s last dictator, he mangles financial terminology and his secret service once jailed the chief executive officer of the world’s biggest potash miner. He’s also turning into a darling of the bond market.

Alexander Lukashenko, president of Belarus, is showing a softer side that’s helped cut the premium on the country’s debt to the lowest in almost a year compared with other emerging markets. The bonds have climbed at twice the pace of Russia’s since February. And Ashmore Group Plc, which owned Belarus Eurobonds as of the end of September, says the rally has further to go.  Read more

China's Graying Migrants Have a Hidden Stash of Money to Spend

Migrant worker Guo Huailiang is planning to live it up a bit in his retirement.

After 19 years living in cramped quarters in Beijing, rising at 5:30 a.m. for a 12-hour shift, the 52-year-old construction worker is socking away money that would allow him to return to his eight-room house and 4-acre plot in the countryside, spend a bit of cash and travel. He’s dreaming of trips to Hainan Island, Taiwan and even South Korea.

Multiply Guo by the millions who migrated to China’s cities, toiling away in factories and building sites for decades, and you have a hoard of savings that stands to revolutionize China’s consumer market. It turns out that China getting old may just help create the balanced economy its leaders have been aiming to engineer.  Read more

More Pain, Slow Gain as Europe's New Bank CEOs Expect Grim Years

Europe’s biggest investment banks are telling investors that it will take years for their overhauls to bear fruit.

John Cryan, Deutsche Bank AG’s co-chief executive officer since July, said on Thursday the next two years will be tough as plans to shed workers and businesses and revamp technology hurt results. He echoed remarks by Tidjane Thiam, Credit Suisse Group AG’s new CEO, who laid out his reorganization plan last week. Rising charges for misconduct and restructuring forced Barclays Plc to cut its profitability target for 2016.

More than seven years after the financial crisis, Europe’s biggest securities firms are still shaking up their businesses to cope with stricter regulation and fines for misleading clients and manipulating markets. The three banks have yet to dispel investor doubts about their growth prospects in the face of increasing capital requirements and competition from U.S. rivals.  Read more

Yuan Rises Most Since 2005 as PBOC Mulls Easing Capital Controls

The yuan surged the most since China scrapped a dollar peg in 2005 as the central bank said it will consider a trial program in the Shanghai free trade zone allowing domestic individual investors to directly buy overseas assets.

The Chinese currency rose 0.62 percent, the most since July 2005, to close at 6.3175 a dollar in Shanghai, according to China Foreign Exchange Trade System prices. The offshore yuan in Hong Kong climbed 0.51 percent to 6.3260 as of 4:41 p.m. local time. The People’s Bank of China earlier strengthened its daily onshore reference rate by 0.16 percent to 6.3495.  Read more

Oil Producers Curb Megaproject Ambitions to Focus on U.S. Shale

Big U.S. oil companies are starting to think small.

A stubborn 16-month crude rout with no end in sight is driving the largest U.S. oil producers away from costly, high-risk megaprojects long touted as the industry’s future and toward safer shale operations that generate the cash needed to satisfy anxious investors.

Exxon Mobil Corp., Royal Dutch Shell Plc, Chevron Corp., ConocoPhillips and Hess Corp. have all either delayed or abandoned projects that range from the deep seas of the Gulf of Mexico to Canada’s oil sands and the U.S. Arctic. At the same time, Exxon and Chevron both announced plans to substantially increase U.S. crude production, largely as a result of their shale operations.  Read more

Did Russian Airstrikes Force U.S. to Include Iran in Syria Talks?

State Department spokesman John Kirby said Thursday Russia’s military intervention in Syria had not compelled the administration’s shift in policy on letting Iran participate in multilateral talks on ending the conflict.

“Is the U.S. forced to include Iran in the process?” Kirby was asked at his daily briefing, one day before widely anticipated talks in Vienna to which Iran has been invited for the first time.  Read more

Senate passes budget and debt deal, sends measure to Obama

In a rare late-night session, the Senate gave final approval to an ambitious budget and debt deal early Friday, sending it to President Barack Obama to sign.

The final vote on passage was 64-35, as Democrats joined forces with Republican defense hawks over the objections of GOP presidential candidates Ted Cruz, Rand Paul, and Marco Rubio, all of whom voted against the deal. The bill is aimed at averting a debt default, avoiding a partial government shutdown and setting spending priorities for the next two years.

Earlier in Friday's session, the Senate voted 63-35 to end debate on the measure. The vote to approve the bill was taken just after 3 a.m. EDT.  Read more

China's Easing of Birth Limit a Boon to Couples, Companies Read more: China's Easing of Birth Limit a Boon to Couples, Companies

China's decision to abolish its one-child policy is a boon not only to couples but to sellers of goods from formula to diapers to toys. And it might help to defuse economic stresses caused by an aging population.
The impact of the surprise change announced Thursday is expected to be gradual. But with incomes rising in the world's most populous country, even a small uptick in births could translate to higher demand from Chinese that ripples around the world.  Read more

Moldovan Parliament Dismisses Govt, Bringing Instability

The Moldovan government lost a no-confidence vote Thursday and was dismissed by Parliament, plunging the impoverished East European country into uncertainty.
Sixty-five lawmakers in the 101-seat legislature voted against the government of Prime Minister Valeriu Strelet, who was appointed July 30. Parliament now has three months to approve a new government or a new election will be held.
After the vote Thursday, Democratic Party leader Marian Lupu said he wanted to form another pro-European government.
Tensions within the pro-European ruling coalition have grown since the Oct. 15 arrest of Vlad Filat, the prime minister from 2009 to 2013, over a massive bank fraud. Filat was arrested on charges of taking bribes of $260 million, allegedly linked to a fraud in which up to $1.5 billion went missing from three Moldovan banks ahead of the November 2014 parliamentary election.  Read more

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US GROUND TROOPS IN SYRIA IS "ILLEGAL, BIG MISTAKE", RUSSIA WARNS OBAMA OF "UNPREDICTABLE CONSEQUENCES"

The change in rhetoric (and apparent shift in strategy) comes just days after the US seemingly prepared the public for what might be coming by releasing helmet cam footage of what Washington says was a raid on an ISIS prison by Delta Force (accompanied by the Peshmerga). 70 prisoners were allegedly freed although not before the US suffered its first combat death in Iraq since 2011.

The timing of the video is suspect, to say the least. It came just days after Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Joe Dunford visited Iraqi PM Haider al-Abadi in an effort to dissuade Baghdad from requesting Russian airstrikes on ISIS targets. In short, it appears as though Washington is trying to simultaneously,  i) prove to Mid-East governments that the US can still be effective in the fight against terrorism even as questions remain about ulterior motives and even as Russia racks up gains in Syria, ii) prepare the public for the possibility that America is about to put boots on the ground in Iraq and Syria. Here’s more from WSJ on Washington’s new “strategy”:

The White House is seriously considering deploying a small squadron of Apache attack helicopters to Iraq as part of a package of new assistance programs to counter Islamic State, according to U.S. officials.

The move could ultimately require the deployment of hundreds more U.S. service members to Iraq. Among other proposals, U.S. officials said some in the military recommend openly deploying a small number of forces on the ground in Syria, embedded among moderate rebels or Kurdish forces there, for the first time.  Read more

22 Ancient Shipwrecks Discovered Near Greek Island

Shipwrecks were the stuff of lore around the craggy coasts of Fourni, a Greek archipelago close to Turkey in the eastern Aegean Sea. Generations of local fishermen and sponge divers had seen piles of ancient pottery collecting algae on the seafloor. Last month, a group of marine archaeologists finally investigated the waters, and their wealthof findings far exceeded expectations.

During the very first dive of the expedition, the team found the remains of a late Roman-period wreck strewn with sea grass in shallow water. By day 5, the researchers had discovered evidence of nine more sunken ships. The next day, they found another six. By the time the 13-day survey was finished, the divers had located 22 shipwrecks— some more than 2,500 years old — that had never been scientifically documented before.  Read more