State Department reaches agreement

Lawyers for conservative legal watchdog Judicial Watch struck a deal with the State Department to go forward with depositions from former aides to Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton over the private email server she used during her time as secretary of State, according to Politico.
The agreement, which came Friday night, calls for sworn depositions from Clinton’s former chief of staff Cheryl Mills, her longtime aide Huma Abedin and information technology specialist Bryan Pagliano, who set up the server.
A federal judge is expected to sign off on the plan as early as next week.

Hillary and Panama Papers

As McClatchy reports, Hillary Clinton recently blasted the hidden financial dealings exposed in the Panama Papers, but she and her husband have multiple connections with people who have used the besieged law firm Mossack Fonseca to establish offshore entities.
Among them are Gabrielle Fialkoff, finance director for Hillary Clinton’s first campaign for the U.S. Senate; Frank Giustra, a Canadian mining magnate who has traveled the globe with Bill Clinton; the Chagoury family, which pledged $1 billion in projects to the Clinton Global Initiative; and Chinese billionaire Ng Lap Seng, who was at the center of a Democratic fund-raising scandal when Bill Clinton was president. Also using the Panamanian law firm was the company founded by the late billionaire investor Marc Rich, an international fugitive when Bill Clinton pardoned him in the final hours of his presidency.

It's expensive being poor

The result: the bottom two-tenths of households have experienced more inflation than most other groups. This is true over the past one, three and five years, and with or without including relatively volatile food and energy prices. The main exception is the very top tenth, which has benefited less from the sharp decline in oil prices because fuel accounts for a much smaller share of this group's typical budget.
The cost of rent has been the main driver of inflation for the poor: It took up about a sixth of the average household budget, and increased by almost 4 percent during the 12 months ended in March. Another noticeable driver is education, on which the poorest 10 percent spend more, as a share of their total budget, than any other group. These effects are more pronounced in so-called core inflation measures, which exclude food and energy...
As it stands, the cost of living is unduly high -- and seems to be rising -- for those who can least afford it.

China's bond market

The unprecedented boom in China’s $3 trillion corporate bond market is starting to unravel.
Spooked by a fresh wave of defaults at state-owned enterprises, investors in China’s yuan-denominated company notes have driven up yields for nine of the past 10 days and triggered the biggest selloff in onshore junk debt since 2014. Local issuers have canceled 60.6 billion yuan ($9.4 billion) of bond sales in April alone, while Standard & Poor’s is cutting its assessment of Chinese firms at a pace unseen since 2003.
While bond yields in China are still well below historical averages, a sustained increase in borrowing costs could threaten an economy that’s more reliant on cheap credit than ever before. The numbers suggest more pain ahead: Listed firms’ ability to service their debt has dropped to the lowest since at least 1992, while analysts are cutting profit forecasts for Shanghai Composite Index companies by the most since the global financial crisis.
“The spreading of credit risks is only at its early stage in China,” said Qiu Xinhong, a Shenzhen-based money manager at First State Cinda Fund Management Co. “Many people have turned bearish.”

Obama escalates war again

The United States will send more troops to Iraq, potentially putting them closer to the frontlines to advise Iraqi forces in the war against Islamic State militants.
U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter made the announcement on Monday during a visit to Baghdad during which he met U.S. commanders, Iraqi Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, and Iraqi Defence Minister Khaled al-Obeidi.