Flash in the pan?

Just as believers in a soft landing for the US economy are duking it out with Team Recessionary, Wall Street has a new snit brewing, albeit of the more common sort—between bulls and bears. On Friday, markets retreated after a week of big gains, with the Nasdaq 100 led downward by the likes of Microsoft and Apple—which had recently closed at all-time highs. The S&P, which had its best week since March, also lost ground. Big names and big banks are warning that this recent bull run is a flash in the pan, and that bad times are around the corner. But confidence in this year’s market rebound continues to build, with money-market funds notching their first outflows in two months, while cash kept on the sidelines by institutional investors has dropped to the lowest point in over a year. For traders betting against the bears, that massive cash pile could keep the bull-market rally chugging along for a while. —David E. Rovella

It won’t last. Among the bigger bears out there is none other than Citigroup. Strategists at the banking giant renewed their prediction that the S&P 500 Index will tumble to 4,000 by the end of the year. Here’s why.

Crispin Odey’s three-decade run as one of London’s most famed and controversial hedge fund managers has come to a screeching halt. Within the space of a week he’s gone from celebrating his best ever year of performance to having to watch helplessly as the firm he founded is broken up.

Vladimir Putin says he’s stationed nuclear weapons in his vassal state of Belarus, just as 31 NATO allies are set to meet next door in Lithuania for their annual meeting. This latest rattling of Kremlin atomic sabers is just the latest of many such shows, Andreas Kluth writes in Bloomberg Opinion. But this time, NATO cannot leave his escalation unanswered. The question isn’t whether to respond, Kluth says, but how.

In his visit to China this weekend, US Secretary of State Antony Blinken will no doubt press to establish “guardrails,” safeguards against accidental clashes between the US and Chinese militaries. Chinese leaders are equally certain to resist, writes Minxin Pei in Bloomberg Opinion. But they’d be making a mistake.

When people worry about the US economy these days, their focus is invariably too myopic, Kathryn Edwards writes in Bloomberg Opinion. Forget about the battle with inflation—the real problem is trajectory. America is turning into an oligopolistic economy that marginalizes the vast majority of its inhabitants, she writes. And it’s going to get much worse. Just look at the numbers.

Micron Technology is said to be close to an agreement to commit at least $1 billion toward setting up a semiconductor packaging factory in India, a move to further diversify the company’s geographic footprint at a time of growing US tensions with China. The deal would also mark a win for Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s ambitious “Make in India” plans, while offering Washington an opportunity to strengthen key supply chains outside of China. Removing barriers to technological trade between the two countries is a key part of Modi’s coming state visit, US National Security Adviser Jake Sullivan said in New Delhi on Tuesday.

Africa’s richest city was built on gold, but it’s now defined by crime, corruption, chaos and dysfunction. Witness Solomon Owa: his fingers work quickly as he speaks over the hum of his sewing machine—that’s because the hum of his sewing machine might stop at any moment. “In a few minutes, the power will go,” he said. The 51-year-old runs a tailoring business from his garage in Johannesburg, where outages leave him idle for up to 10 hours a day. It encapsulates the wider collapse of basic services across South Africa. From a broken railway network disrupting trade to archaic sanitation that triggered a recent cholera outbreak, parts of the country increasingly look like a failing state.

At the latest luxury all-inclusive resort in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, you can dine on a seven-course meal from one of the world’s best chefs, have your butler deliver Champagne in the middle of the night to your outdoor hydromassage bathtub or drive an amphibious vehicle through Mayan jungles and flooded caves—without ever seeing an upcharge. That’s the promise at La Casa de la Playa, where the 63 ocean-view suites can easily cost $2,000 per person per night. It’s just one of a growing, expensive flock of similar redoubts—and people are paying for it.

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