The World Bank Group today released the findings of its probe into data irregularities discovered in 2018 and 2020 reports; and along with those findings, it confirmed that it will be discontinuing 'Doing Business' reports.

Update (1055ET): Amid all the Washington fearmongering over this weekend' s rally, Roger Stone made an appearance on RT last night to warn that "it's a setup," advising protesters to "stay away."

Special counsel John Durham is reportedly seeking a grand jury indictment against to indict an attorney representing Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign after he allegedly peddled a fake story in 2016 that the Trump campaign was using a secret server to communicate with a Russian bank - a lie promoted by Hillary Clinton herself.

Perpetual Tesla skeptic and sell-side researcher Gordon Johnson of GLJ Research pointed out something odd this week: Tesla's local sales numbers reported for August don't seem to match that of official insurance data from the country. In fact, the number being reported by media appears to be more than 5x higher than what insurance data out of the country is showing.

"Based on official insurance data provided by CATARC (no one can buy a car in China without insurance, so insured figures are [very] precise), TSLA sold a total of 2.815K cars in China in Aug. 2021. Yet, when compared to CPAC data (i.e., sales data provided by TSLA’s marketing division to the Chinese government), which shows 12.885K TSLA cars sold in China in Aug. 2021, there seems to be a MAJOR problem in TSLA’s reported Aug. 2021 China sales figures," Johnson wrote.

"Not until Aug. 2021 did the numbers TSLA reported to CPCA differ, materially, from the actual insurance sales numbers provided by...

Of all the mass delusions running rampant in the culture, none is more spectacularly delusional than the conviction that we can all get fabulously rich from speculation while producing nothing. The key characteristic of speculation is that it produces nothing: it doesn't generate any new goods or services, boost productivity or increase the functionality of real-world essentials.

Like all mass delusions, the greater the disconnect from reality, the greater the appeal. Mass delusions gain their escape velocity by leaving any ties to real-world limitations behind, and by igniting the most powerful booster to human euphoric confidence known, greed.

Lost in the mania of easy wealth from speculative trading is the absence of any value creation in the rotation-churn of moving bets from one table to the latest hot game: in flipping houses sight unseen, no functionality was added to the house. In transferring bets on one cryptocurrency to another or from...

Fed Presidents Robert Kaplan and Eric Rosengren have committed to liquidating their portfolios (at a particularly auspicious time for stocks, which continued to smash through ATHs all summer long) in the wake of a market-shaking scandal caused by the release of senior Fed officials' financial disclosure forms, which revealed that Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan made several million-dollar trades in 2020, while his fellow Fed officials (including Boston's Eric Rosengren) made smaller trades of their own. The financial revelations followed speculation about Fed Chairman Powell's portfolio late last month in research published by Dylan Grice.

But even Grice probably didn't expect the popular backlash elicited by news that senior Fed officials were playing the stock market, just like the unwashed Robinhood-loving masses, while their hands were on the money printer. On social media, users mocked the news as potentially damning for the central bank's credibility, since even...

This morning's better-than-expected retail sales data and worse-than-expected labor market data has sparked some significant moves away from stocks.

The dollar is roaring higher - tagging high stops from last week (is good retail sales news hawkish for Fed taper?)...

On Monday we noted how Goldman sounded a red alert over the debt limit debate brewing in Congress - which has a "drop dead date" sometime between late October and early November.

As repo expert Scott Skyrm said, "for the past several years, Congress always reached a compromise before the possibility of a "technical default" creeped into the markets. This year, as we get closer to the "drop dead date" (which hasn't yet been determined) the markets will start pricing in distortions."

Well, it appears things are headed in that direction with Thursday morning news from Bloomberg that Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen to pound sand over working with Democrats to raise the federal debt ceiling.

By Michael Every of Rabobank

Yesterday’s Chinese data were a real shock. In particular, retail sales were up only 2.5% y/y in August vs. 7.0% expected and only 3.0% 2y/y. This is hardly what one calls a robust consumer recovery – and given industrial production was only slightly weaker than projected, explains why China is running such large trade surpluses: supply is up, demand is flat. Enter ‘Common prosperity’ – which Wall Street is still struggling to understand given it will read anything else but the actual instruction manual. Yet there was another report out yesterday --beyond Evergrande, which today just suspended all its onshore bonds -- just as shocking in some ways, and which Wall Street is not only refusing to read, but apparently to print. Reuters reported: “EXCLUSIVE China brokers drop yuan forecasts to avoid regulators' ire”.

It claims “Brokerages in China have dropped detailed currency forecasts from their research notes, or have restricted access to...

SHOCK VIDEO: Senior doctors and a marketing director at in North Carolina discussed inflating COVID-19 numbers by counting recovered patients as active COVID patients. "We need to be... more scary to the public... If you don't get vaccinated, you know you're going to die." pic.twitter.com/66CcIsVR4B