Juggling Dynamite

Bloomberg’s senior market correspondent Julie Hyman reports that concern is growing that stock prices may not rise much longer as borrowing to buy U.S. stocks nears a record.Here is a direct link.

While plenty of client entertainment takes place on Wall Street, traders and brokers say such activity is even more prevalent in London.

“In the U.S., the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a Wall Street self-regulatory organization, imposes a limit of $100 per person per year on gifts or other spending by brokers designed to score more business or better terms. Finra says dinners and other business entertainment don’t count toward this limit, provided they are “neither so frequent nor so extensive as to raise any question of propriety.”

No such limit exists in the U.K.”

WSJ’s David Enrich looks at how the London brokerage industry goes to great lengths to curry favor with top traders. The brokerage industry’s efforts to woo traders range from taking them to fancy dinners to sometimes providing them with cocaine and prostitutes to allegedly helping them manipulate a key global interest rate.Here is a direct link.

A quirky visual presentation reminding of the ticking demographic bomb facing Europe (and China, Japan and the UK and to a lesser but still significant degree, North America). Here is a direct link.