| Debt deal almost done, labor market check, and tether mystery. There's plenty of relief evident in markets this morning as Senators seem to have all-but agreed a deal on a short-term increase in the debt ceiling. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer suggested an agreement would be in place by this morning. While the deal is surely good news for markets worried about an imminent default, it only moves the problem out to December when the drama and brinksmanship may run again. 
Yesterday's ADP employment data for September came in much stronger than expected, with the pace of hiring indicating that companies are having greater success filling open positions since the end of enhanced federal unemployment benefits. This morning, attention turns to weekly jobless claims, a number that has risen in each of the last three weeks. All of which serves as the appetizer for tomorrow's critical payrolls report which is expected to show around half a million positions were added in September.   | In the sometimes confusing world of cryptocurrencies, where joke coins can rally more than 350% because of an Elon Musk tweet, there is one thing that is supposed to make sense: stablecoins. They are, in theory, backed 1-for-1 by dollars and are used by investors to make transactions in cryptocurrencies. The problem for regulators is that the number of stablecoins is increasing very rapidly, and it is becoming unclear whether the most popular ones are fully backed by dollars. Circulation of Tether has increased by 48 billion coins to 69 billion this year, which, if the issuer held $69 billion to maintain the 1-to1 backing would make it one of the 50 largest banks in the U.S. — if it was a bank and not an unregulated offshore company. The potential postponement of the debt ceiling deadline and the reversal of some of the surge in energy prices is helping risk appetite. Overnight the MSCI Asia Pacific Index climbed 1.2% while Japan's Topix index closed 0.1% lower. In Europe the Stoxx 600 Index had added 1% by 5:50 a.m. Eastern Time with every industry sector in the green. S&P 500 futures pointed to a solid gain at the open, the 10-year Treasury yield was at 1.522%, oil dropped to near $76 a barrel and gold was lower. The minutes of the latest ECB meeting are published at 7:30 a.m. Initial jobless claims are at 8:30 a.m. U.S. consumer credit data for August is at 3:00 p.m. The Nobel Prize for Literature is announced. Tilray Inc., Conagra Brands Inc. and Accolade Inc. are among the companies reporting results. Here's what caught our eye over the last 24 hours. The U.S. officially went entirely off the gold standard in 1971 under Richard Nixon. Dollars are officially backed by nothing. You're not entitled to redeem anything for them. Money is created out of thin air now. And yet in many respects, particularly in our language and in our politics, the gold standard still haunts us. We still talk about quantities of money and we still fret about "going broke" and balancing the books, and "paying for" spending books. All of these ideas made some sense perhaps, when money had to be backed by some physical thing for it to retain its value. But now all of these comments are simply vestigial, and lead to us not really understanding the nature of fiat currency. Ironically, the one thing that could really get people to appreciate the sort of arbitrariness of fiat currency would be minting the trillion dollar coin out of platinum to avert a debt ceiling crisis. All it would take to do that would be to take a mold for an existing $100 platinum coin, and then add a bunch of zeroes to it, mint that and it would be worth $1,000,000,000,000. I have a new piece out this morning arguing that if we went and did that, not only would we end the crisis, we would effectively bury gold standard thinking for good. It might take the platinum standard to defeat the gold standard. Read the whole thing here. Follow Bloomberg's Joe Weisenthal on Twitter @TheStalwart. Like Bloomberg's Five Things? Subscribe for unlimited access to trusted, data-based journalism in 120 countries around the world and gain expert analysis from exclusive daily newsletters, The Bloomberg Open and The Bloomberg Close. | 
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