Tens of thousands of users were affected by a Google search outage that struck on Monday this week. 

At about 9PM Eastern Time, reports started hitting DownDetector that the site had stopped working for some users. In addition to the U.S., problems were also recorded in Taiwan and Japan, Bloomberg wrote in a follow up report.

More than 40,000 reports of service interruption came through on DownDetector, the report says. 

A little less than a month ago we reported that in addition to institutional investors, many of whom we knew had already thrown in the towel with hedge fund gross and net exposure the lowest in years, retail investors had also capitulated as their BTFD euphoria, observed so often during the stimmy days of 2021, was nowhere to be found.

Well, not anymore. With TSLA stock soaring 50% from its recent May lows prompting many to wonder if this is another manipulated gamma squeeze by the "usual suspects"...

As Bloomberg's Sebastian Boyd writes, it’s hard to overstate the importance of Wednesday’s US inflation report to a market that’s split between two different views of the economy, and the Fed’s plans for dealing with it.

The report is critical because - among other things - two weeks ago, at his July 27 press conference, Powell said the Fed would slow the pace of hikes at some point... but he also made clear that the central bank thinks the labor market remains strong and that is offsetting the slowdown in demand. Friday’s nonfarms payrolls data bore that out in a stunning way, with the US economy creating far more jobs than any of the 71 economists in Bloomberg’s survey expected (granted, the Household survey painted an entirely different picture but we'll cross that bridge in time). For all intents and purposes, the market saw the number as super hawkish, and while Fed funds were pricing in a 36% chance of a 75-bp September hike before payrolls, they’re now looking at a...

There’s a better, and less cliché-ridden, way to frame that...

Have you seen A Man For All Seasons? If you haven’t, you should. If you have, you’ll remember one of the single greatest scenes in all of film. Sir Thomas More – the one Henry VIII had beheaded because he wouldn’t agree that Henry could head an independent English church – is visited in his home by Richard Rich, who asks him for a job. More roundly refuses, after which Rich slinks away, having made it clear to all that he intends to get revenge on More for this rejection. More’s family can’t believe that he had allowed Rich to leave. They break into horrified cries, demanding that More, as Chancellor of the Exchequer, arrest Rich. More refuses, explaining that he can’t arrest even the devil until he’s broken the law.

It was just another boring old day on an Australian Sheep Farm...

That is, until three "large chunks of space debris" that are being attributed to SpaceX, crashed landed from the sky, according to the Australian Space Agency. 

The "junk" was found embedded in farmlands in New South Wales, according to Live Science. It came from "part of a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that likely reentered the Earth's atmosphere on July 9", according to the report. 

Felipe Diego Alonzo, 38; Nesly Norberto Martinez Gomez, 37; Lopez Mateo Mateo, 42; and Juan Gutierrez Castro, 45, were apprehended in Guatemala on Aug. 2 and extradited to the United States at the request of U.S. officials, according to the Department of Justice (DOJ). Fifteen other individuals were also arrested during the multi-city sweep.

“As a result of the search warrants, law enforcement recovered 10 high valued motor vehicles, firearms, and cash,” the DOJ stated.

On top of the “prolific smuggling” of illegal aliens from Guatemala through Mexico and into the United States, the defendants are being charged in relation to a woman’s death.

In early April, the defendants allegedly agreed to smuggle a Guatemalan woman from Quiche, Guatemala, to the United States for almost $10,000, according to the indictment.

The woman died after spending several days trekking through the desert near Odessa, Texas, according to court documents. Odessa is about 200...

by Ven Ram, cross-aset strategist for Bloomberg's Markets Live

The inversion in a key segment of the US yield curve may deepen to levels not seen since the 1980s as competing concerns about higher policy rates and their economic impact play out in the markets.

Ten-year Treasuries now offer a yield of around 2.78%, compared with about 3.28% on two-year maturities, leading to a differential of minus 50 basis points. That spread may invert further to minus 65 basis points, and beyond, in the coming months as front-end bonds sell off more than longer maturities.

By BlueApples

As if the FBI raid on Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago residence didn’t reek of corruption enough, details from the search warrant authorizing it should clear any doubt. Although information if sparse given that the warrant remains under seal, one piece of information that couldn’t be kept confidential sheds new light on the motives behind the raid.

The judge who signed off on the search warrant was Bruce E. Reinhart, United States Magistrate Judge for the Southern District of Florida. Before assuming his office as a federal judge, Reinhart was an attorney who represented associates of Jeffrey Epstein implicated in his human trafficking conspiracy, namely; Sarah Kellen and Nadia Marcinkova. 

European Union efforts to salvage a rebooted Iran nuclear deal appear to have produced a "final text" which is described as tackling all remaining issues. The Vienna talks are now being declared definitively over. 

"After 16 months of torturous on-and-off indirect negotiations to restore the deal, the European Union’s foreign affairs chief Josep Borrell suggested there was no more room for negotiation on the draft now on the table," the Associated Press writes of the fresh announcement.

So the FBI, under Democrat guidance, break into a former President’s home and ransack through his belongings and it’s somehow the GOP that is responsible for the ‘weaponising’.

Remarkable.

The article quotes several Democrats waxing about how ‘justice is being served’, and then claims that Republicans are engaging in “florid rhetoric” that will “enflame America’s political divisions” and encourage Trump supporters to further point to a “deep state conspiracy”.

Armed federal agents in the dead of night cracking open a former President’s safe in an attempt to steal documents. Nothing Deep Statey or conspiracy like about that is there.

The piece concludes by quoting ‘never Trumper’ Joe Walsh who tweeted “The Republican Party has abandoned the rule of law. Just listen to them tonight. They’re at war with the rule of law.”

Australia's Reserve Bank is launching a pilot program over the course of the next year in collaboration with the Bank for International Settlements (the central bank of central banks) to test the “benefits” of a blockchain ledger based digital currency system.  The central bank is added to a long list of participants in BIS efforts to introduce CBDCs (central bank digital currencies) with the target goal of launching them globally by 2025-2030.

It's important to note that substantial economic changes would have to occur within the next few years in order to make CBDC a viable option for the general public.  Though many people use electronic transactions as a matter of convenience, a large portion of the population still prefers cash.  In the US, surveys within the last few years show that at least 37% of Americans still choose cash over other methods of payment like credit and debit cards.  In Australia, the number stands at around...