Don’t worry about the government

Senate Democrats agreed to vote to fund the government through Feb. 8 in exchange for Republican Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s “intention” to let the Senate vote—later, of course—on an immigration measure. The deal falls far short of what many were after: a promise (not just an intention) to bring a fix for the DACA program (not just a general immigration bill) to the floor. The fact that enough Democrats still voted to end the shutdown suggests they'd begun to feel the political heat from the White House.

Trump kept one promise. The shutdown is proof, executive editor Timothy L. O’Brien writes for Bloomberg View.“The president who said he would run the government just like he ran his businesses is doing just that,”O’Brien writes, saying “bad business decisions—and an inability to manage budgets, deadlines and his own finances—brought him to the brink of personal bankruptcy in the early 1990s.” O’Brien likens Trump to “a carnival barker who fostered a cult of personality, not a business wizard who built and managed complex, efficient bureaucracies.”

Those in glass boxes couldn’t blow loans. That’s the idea, anyway, behind Lloyds’ plan to put some London traders in a literal glass box, the better to comply with rules requiring lenders to shield core services from riskier banking activities. Those rules were put in place after the financial crisis, during which Lloyds took about 20 billion pounds ($28 billion) of taxpayer money to keep from collapsing. Under the bank’s plan, some 120 staffers in its corporate markets division will be put in partitioned rooms, sources told Bloomberg.

Turkey isn’t making Russia’s Syria victory easy. A month ago, Vladimir Putin declared victory in the Syrian civil war he’d helped turn in the regime’s favor. Turkey’s assault on Kurdish militias fighting in northern Syria is complicating that. Russia sees the Syrian Kurds, who control large swaths near the Turkish border, as a potential ally and key part of any settlement. Turkey's president has vowed to destroy them. And about 2,000 American troops are embedded with them—“one of the most destabilizing issues,” one analyst says.

The rare bear who called the housing bust sees signs of another. “It is 2005 all over again in terms of the valuation extreme, the psychological excess and the denial,” says money manager James Stack, who predicted the last decade’s housing crash in that year, just before prices peaked. “People don’t believe housing is in a bubble and don’t want to hear talk about prices being a little bit bubblish.” Today, he’s practically alone in his wariness; most analysts see no end in sight for the six-year-old recovery.

Nordic banks and Nigerian traders are getting cautious on Bitcoin. The biggest Nordic bank, Nordea, has told its employees not to trade cryptocurrencies—a ban that could prompt the European Banking Federation to review its official stance on them. (The second-biggest Nordic bank is “skeptical” of Bitcoin but hasn’t instituted an outright ban.) Meanwhile, more DIY efforts in Nigeria are just the other side of the, er, Bitcoin: Traders there are taking an old-school approach to foiling scammers, forming their own informal groups to verify transactions.

Fear of missing out, along with the passage of the U.S. tax overhaul, is pushing U.S. stock market indexes to new highs. The bull market, in its ninth year, has left many investors wary of buying at the top but pained at the thought of moving into cash. Cue our panel of experts, who've got a range of carefully considered ideas for what to do with any bonus or extra cash in such a fraught environment—from buying capital goods stocks to boosting international stock holdings.