Israeli TV station Channel 12 reported Sunday that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had fallen out with army chief Eyal Zamir over an unspecified new directive on Iran.

Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz have both denied the reports, but a senior Israeli source with deep knowledge of the people involved has told CBS News the report of a rift seems credible.

The biggest tell, the source said, is that the Channel 12 report passed through military censorship. All stories by Israeli media that deal with national security must go through the censor before publication. This is key, according to the source, because it indicates that military brass felt it was necessary for the public to have the information before Israeli parliamentary elections on Tuesday.

Had it been false, the military censor would have simply prevented it from being published, the source told CBS News.

(Continue Reading - CBS)

How does Wall Street quantify fear? Political boogeymen get names (Red Menace, death panels); financial ones get numbers. The VIX captures the market’s twitchiness, while credit-default spreads calculate the odds of a company going bust.

When it comes to AI jitters, the price of fear is settling somewhere around 200 basis points.

When SpaceX issued its first corporate bonds — back in the giddy, futuro-optimist days of… four months ago — it paid 6.65% for the most expensive piece. The most expensive slice of the $40 billion of private credit borrowing it’s finalized in recent days will cost as much as 8.75%, a person familiar with the matter said, having shot higher since we reported on price talks last week.

(Continue Reading - Semafor)

Inflation has broadened more clearly in the U.S. than in other advanced economies over the last year, raising the risk that price pressures will prove more persistent than current core inflation readings suggest. This could keep U.S. interest rates elevated for longer, according to a new Fitch Ratings report.

The share of U.S. CPI components with annual inflation above 3% was 46% in September, twice the 2018-2019 average of 23%. The breadth of these increases shows that U.S. price pressures extend beyond energy and are spread across a much wider range of goods and services.

“U.S. inflation breadth began increasing before the recent acceleration in headline inflation,” said Olu Sonola, Head of US Economics at Fitch Ratings. “This suggests that the rise in inflation is not solely an energy story. Even if energy pressures fade, broader price increases could slow inflation’s return to target and keep monetary policy higher for longer.”

(Continue Reading – Fitch)