I polished my first wife every day and eventually she left me and took the car...

The Supreme Court agreed on Monday to take up a case that could threaten the existence of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and potentially the status of numerous other federal agencies, including the Federal Reserve.
A panel of three Trump appointees on the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled last fall that the agency's funding is unconstitutional because the CFPB gets its money from the Federal Reserve, which in turn is funded by bank fees.
Although the agency reports regularly to Congress and is routinely audited, the Fifth Circuit ruled that is not enough. The CFPB's money has to be appropriated annually by Congress or the agency, and everything it does is unconstitutional, the lower courts said.
The CFPB is not the only agency funded this way. The Federal Reserve itself is funded not by Congress but by banking fees. The U.S. Postal Service, the U.S. Mint, and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which protects bank depositors, and more, are also not funded by annual congressional appropriations.
In its brief to the Supreme Court, the Biden administration noted that even programs like Social Security and Medicare are paid for by mandatory spending, not annual appropriations.
"This marks the first time in our nation's history that any court has held that Congress violated the Appropriations Clause by enacting a law authorizing spending," wrote the Biden administration's Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar.
Conservatives who have long opposed the modern administrative state have previously challenged laws that declared heads of agencies can only be fired for cause. In recent years, the Supreme Court has agreed and struck down many of those provisions. The court has held that administrative agencies are essentially creatures of the Executive Branch, so the president has to be able to fire at-will and not just for cause.
But while those decisions did change the who, in terms of who runs these agencies, they did not take away the agencies' powers. Now comes a lower court decision that essentially invalidates the whole mission of the CFPB.
The CFPB was the brainchild of then White House aide, and now U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren. She issued a statement Monday noting that lower courts have previously and repeatedly upheld the constitutionality of the CFPB.
"If the Supreme Court follows more than a century of law and historical precedent," she said, "it will strike down the Fifth Circuit's decision before it throws our financial market and economy into chaos."
The high court will not hear arguments in the case until next term, so a decision is unlikely until 2024.

At its core, Hong Kong’s unique selling point is that it’s China-by-proxy for investors; enterprises in the People’s Republic account for 78% of the market capitalisation of Hong Kong’s main boards. The Stock Connect scheme run by bourse operator Hong Kong Exchanges and Clearing (0388.HK) lets money move across China’s capital controls in a limited way. Officials familiar with the situation say that it handles as much as 70% of all international investment flows into stocks listed in mainland China.

RE China
[snip]
I have serious qualms about China's human rights record and the increasing threat to world stability, but I think the major investment risks ( other than a shooting war) are
1) I do not think you can believe their numbers and accounting, as the Government has and will continue to manipulate them and
2) The government has intervened in aggressively in companies management when it wanted to. Jack Ma disappeared for a while remember?
[snip]

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What’s interesting, I think, is that EM got off to a good start this year with DODEX briefly up north of 10%. That early impetus was from mainly a retreat from China’s harsh anti-covid lockdowns plus some easing by their central bank. However, the fund has fallen back to around +2-3% YTD after a near 2% drop Friday. The early good news was offset by the balloon controversy and other growing tensions between the U.S. & China.
EM has been over-hyped since I was in my 40s (long ago). Our Templeton Funds advisor shifted our workplace 403-Bs from a very fine TEMWX back then into a newer EM fund, TEGOX, (in the early 90s). Did receive our permission first. However that fund never produced and eventually closed.
Not meant as advice - but I’d be loath to second guess D&C. Sometimes the best opportunities come along when things look grimmest.

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This conflict on redlining aside, it’s funny to me to see people get nostalgic about their cars when they were young. Much of my life I took subways and buses, so I have no nostalgia for automobiles. It’s hard to get nostalgic about public transportation, although, oddly, sometimes I do: “Ah, remember that time when you were young on the train and someone taller than you was standing over you with his sweaty underarm in your face? Those were the days!” I like cities, always have, always will, yet they too had their own forms of segregation, awful in their own urban way.