Matt Phillips

The British Raj came to an abrupt end 67 years ago today, setting off the bloody and traumatic partition period that eventually gave birth to India and Pakistan. While linked—essentially the countries are twins, born at the nearly the same moment in August 1947—Pakistan and India have had a contentious history of military confrontation as their economic and political structures developed along starkly divergent paths.

Here it is.

The world’s biggest retailer is struggling—and it doesn’t expect things to get better any time soon.

ProPublica scribe Jesse Eisinger has offered up a lengthy piece on the state of the SEC, a top US financial regulator, under the leadership of current Chair Mary Jo White. The upshot: White’s SEC has irritated a range of political players and fellow regulatory entities.

The types of people who go to conferences at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York are talking once again about overhauling the tri-party repo market.

Greece’s GDP shrank by a mere 0.2% in the second quarter. While still a decline, it’s the smallest drop since the third quarter of 2008—which means that after 24 consecutive quarters of economic contraction, the Greek recession’s end might finally be at a hand.

American companies want workers—they just aren’t actually hiring them yet.

Venezuela has the world’s cheapest gasoline. The pump price runs at roughly $0.05 a gallon. And at black-market currency exchange rates it’s more like $0.01 a gallon, according to a recent economic analysis from Barclays.

Brevan Howard, one of Europe’s largest hedge funds, also is one of the world’s most secretive. So it’s surprising to see a court battle involving the London-based firm spill out into the public eye.

For a while now, solid fundamentals have been considered somewhat optional for global investors.

China’s trade surplus surged to a record high $47.3 billion in July, topping the previous peak set in November 2008. On the one hand this is good news; it suggests that the global economic system that has driven growth for the last decade is making a return.

They had a bit of a relapse in April, when Americans credit-card debt surged by nearly $9 billion. That was the biggest jump in card usage since the Great Recession, and a major break with post-crisis behavior. Since then credit-card debt growth as been much more modest. In May it rose by a bit less than $2 billion and we just learned that in June (pdf) the increase was only $1 billion.

Australia hasn’t had a recession since the early 1990s, thanks to an economy ever-more focused on digging stuff out of the ground and selling it to the industrial behemoth that is China.

It’s hard to overstate the appeal of tax cuts in the US, a nation that was primarily formed in opposition to government revenue collection.

If you want to know how the richest family in the neighborhood is doing, you’d do well to ask the neighbors.

Not only is it a great name for a punk band, but porcine epidemic diarrhea is a real disease that’s decimating US hog supplies and driving prices for pork products sky high. In fact, prices for bacon are the highest on record, at $6.11 a pound in the US.

Big numbers from global auto-making giants Toyota Motor and BMW today showed that the global appetite for sport utility vehicles—which saw demand crater during the worst of the Great Recession in the US—are making a big, profitable comeback.

I try to watch as much of the economic data flow as I can, but last week, I might have missed the most-important global turn-of-the-screw amid the deluge of high-profile US data, such as Friday’s jobs report.

More money, more options.

It was a big week for US economic activity—with jobs and GDP statistics and a meeting and decision from the Fed—but it was Europe that was whipsawed the hardest, with major equity markets tumbling.

This last week was a big one in that it showed broad-based improvement in the global economy. The US recovery seems to be gathering strength, if not picking up speed. Signs of hope emerged in Europe. And Asian markets telegraphed growing expectations that governments there will take action to kick economic expansion into a higher gear. Here are the key developments from the week that was:

Pretty darn good.

If there is one thing equity markets excel at, it’s sniffing out government stimulus.