North Korea Denies Planting Mines that Injured Three South Korean Soldiers

Jobless Claims & JOLTs Confirm 'Higher Hire, No Fire' Economy With JOLTs data showing record hiring (and ADP signaling acceleration in job additions), today we get some signal on firings as the number of Americans filing for unemployment benefits for the first time was at 200k last week (below the 205k exp) and continuing to languish near multi-decade lows (near 1967 lows!!)... Source: Bloomberg Non-seasonally adjusted across all the states saw a 299k drop in claims led by Rhode Island and Arizona (California and Michigan saw the biggest increases)... Continuing jobless claims also...

IEA Warns Escalation In US-Iran Hostilities Could Upend Oil Surplus Forecast Despite the tentative recovery of oil flows through the Strait of Hormuz and the first build-up in global stocks since the war began, this week’s re-escalation of the U.S.-Iran hostilities could flip the outlook for an oil market surplus for next year, the International Energy Agency said on Friday.  Oil prices have plunged since the United States and Iran signed the memorandum of understanding (MoU) in the middle of June, with North Sea Dated prices down by $31 per barrel in...

Russia Is Single-Handedly Standing Against The West: Putin "It was they who carried out the coup d'etat in Ukraine, which forced us to take the people of Crimea under protection. When they started the war, they started bombing Donetsk using warplanes" - Putin in a fresh address to Russian service members came out swinging, giving a familiar lesson in recent history. And quite provocatively, he emphasized that Russia is now practically fighting against the entirety of the collective West in the Ukraine conflict in the Friday remarks. "Russia is standing against the...