A bear market for the lads? Britain is on track to shed more than one pub a day this year. The UK has lost one-quarter of the pubs it had in the year 2000 (when you were still allowed to smoke in pubs and a British politician was reminiscing about when he’d drink 14 pints in a single day).

On Thursday, the S&P 500 set a new closing high with a 0.8% gain, the Nasdaq 100 rose 0.9%, and the Russell 2000 outperformed with a 1.3% advance. Every S&P sector ETF outside of utilities ended positive on the session, with the cyclical sectors of consumer discretionary, industrials, and financials all up in excess of 1%.

🎵 🎞️ Pop (culture) quiz: test your knowledge of movies, music, and other miscellany: 

The federal government is planning to ease up on rules that are potentially reining in the widespread adoption and production of autonomous vehicles. The news comes the same day that demand for robotaxis – specifically Tesla’s Robotaxi – was revealed in a major way. 

“Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards were written for vehicles with human drivers and need to be updated for autonomous vehicles. Removing these requirements will reduce costs and enhance safety,” NHTSA Chief Counsel Peter Simshauser said in a statement.

Earlier this year NHTSA announced it was loosening other rules around autonomous cars, including exempting them from certain federal safety rules for research and demonstration purposes.

Nobody ever said this is going to be easy, though. It remains to be seen how comfortable people are riding in a vehicle that doesn’t have windshield wipers, and that seems, to both passengers and other drivers on the road, to be flying blind, even if the onboard software can pierce the fog. And we’re surely not the only ones who remember the “Looney Toons” test a Tesla failed.

Shares of meme stock/online real estate company Opendoor Technologies finished the day up 16% after President Shrisha Radhakrishna outlined the launch of a community hub to “provide consistent and transparent updates about Opendoor’s business, leadership, and strategy” as well as source questions from its passionate investor base.

If there’s a signal in how much traders seem to value the new approach compared to the old leadership, former CEO (and current adviser) Carrie Wheeler has filed notice of her intent to sell 7 million shares (or a little less than half her position) in the company, and it hasn’t even made a dent in the stock price this week.

Now here’s something of an inversion of your typical corporate wisdom first coined in the late eighties when swashbuckling investors tried to seize major corporations through leveraged buyouts. When the barbarians are at the gate, maybe just let them in and hear them out?

A romp to $5,000 would represent a roughly 40% increase from Monday’s New York spot closing price, but the bank says gold could hedge the increased inflation, currency weakness, and poor stock and bond performance typically associated with central banks run by politicians.

See how the “Trump effect” has already boosted gold’s price

Public companies now hold more than 1 million bitcoin.

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