The routine lying by the Trump administration is just beyond belief. Mike Flynn has consistently denied that he talked to the Russian ambassador in December about President Obama's sanctions against Russia, but apparently he did exactly that. Here are Greg Miller, Adam Entous and Ellen Nakashima in the Washington Post tonight:

Flynn on Wednesday denied that he had discussed sanctions with [Sergey] Kislyak. Asked in an interview whether he had ever done so, he twice said, “No.” On Thursday, Flynn, through his spokesman, backed away from the denial. The spokesman said Flynn “indicated that while he had no recollection of discussing sanctions, he couldn’t be certain that the topic never came up.”

....The emerging details contradict public statements by incoming senior administration officials including Mike Pence...Nine current and former officials, who were in senior positions at multiple agencies at the time of the calls, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss intelligence matters.

All of those officials said ­Flynn’s references to the election-related sanctions were explicit. Two of those officials went further, saying that Flynn urged Russia not to overreact to the penalties being imposed by President Barack Obama, making clear that the two sides would be in position to review the matter after Trump was sworn in as president. “Kislyak was left with the impression that the sanctions would be revisited at a later time,” said a former official.

A third official put it more bluntly, saying that either Flynn had misled Pence or that Pence misspoke. A spokesman for Pence did not respond to a request for comment. The sanctions in question have so far remained in place.

Nine officials! And every one of them says Flynn explicitly talked about the sanctions that Obama levied on Russia as retaliation for their cyber-hacking during the campaign. The message: don't worry about it. We've got your back.

Do these guys ever tell the truth? About anything?

President Trump lost his appeal today to keep his immigration ban in place:

A federal appeals court on Thursday refused to reinstate President Trump’s targeted travel ban, delivering the latest and most stinging judicial rebuke to his effort to make good on a campaign promise and tighten the standards for entry into the United States.

....The decision is likely to be quickly appealed to the United States Supreme Court. That court remains short-handed and could deadlock. A 4-to-4 tie in the Supreme Court would leave the appeals court’s ruling in place.

It's worth pointing out that this isn't a ruling on whether Trump's immigration order is legal. It's not even a ruling on whether it should be blocked pending the result of other lawsuits. It's a ruling on an emergency stay of the temporary restraining order issued last week by a district court in Seattle. For now, the TRO remains in place unless the Supreme Court overturns the cicuit court and grants the emergency stay. Later we'll get a full hearing on the TRO, and following that we'll get trials on the various lawsuits challenging the legality of the immigration order.

UPDATE: This has been rewritten to more accurately explain what happened here.

The New York Times reminds us today that the eurozone's debt worries are still with us:

Even as global stock markets climb, worries are building among investors that long-simmering debt troubles in Greece and Italy will put additional strain on the euro....The result has been a sell-off of European government bonds as investment funds reassess the risks of holding such securities. In Italy, for instance, some hedge funds are making direct bets that the prices of Italian bonds will collapse.

Italy’s debt as a share of its economic output has risen to 133 percent from 123 percent during that period. In Greece, debt has increased to an expected 183 percent of the country’s total economy from 159 percent....And with Italy and Greece held back by the fiscal constraints that the euro’s rules require and not expected to generate sufficient growth in the future, the only alternatives are a restructuring of debt or an exit from the common currency.

Ah yes, either debt relief or massive austerity or exit from the euro. But the two primary funders of the ongoing Greek bailout, Germany and the IMF, don't agree on which it should be. Here's the Wall Street Journal:

Germany and the IMF share an extremely low opinion of the quality of Greece’s political class and institutions. But from this they have drawn different conclusions....Berlin will keep funding Athens, but it wants to maintain leverage over the country’s economic decision-making to protect German taxpayers.

But the IMF sees this as a recipe for perpetual can-kicking fundamentally at odds with its own institutional priorities....The IMF’s credibility has already been battered by one failed Greek program and is determined not to be sucked into another. For the IMF, therefore, this Greek program must be the last—and given its extreme low confidence in the Greek political class, a program is unlikely to be successful without very substantial debt relief.

Germany wants a decade of austerity. The IMF considers this to be a fantasy and wants to face reality square on: Bite the bullet and write off a big chunk of Greece's debt so they have at least a fighting chance of kickstarting growth and becoming solvent again.

I don't have much to say about this, aside from the fact that as long as the eurozone's core countries continue to run big capital outflows and eurozone monetary policies continue to favor those core countries, there's likely to be steady stress on poorer countries in the south who are stuck using a euro that doesn't really fit their needs.

As long as these outflows don't turn into big inflows in the south, everything is probably sustainable. But how long can that stay true? I'm not sure, but it still doesn't look as if Europe is dealing with its fundamental problem of trying to maintain a single currency and a single monetary policy for a set of very different countries.

Mainly, though, this post is just a reminder that Europe is still quietly struggling with its economy. For the moment, their crisis is under control. But then, it always is until suddenly it isn't.

From the New York Times:

Almost half of people in their early 20s have a secret, one they don’t usually share even with friends: Their parents help them pay the rent.

Moving into adulthood has never been easy, but America’s rapidly changing labor market is making it harder to find economic security at a young age....According to surveys that track young people through their first decade of adulthood, about 40 percent of 22-, 23- and 24-year-olds receive some financial assistance from their parents for living expenses. Among those who get help, the average amount is about $3,000 a year.

Earnings of young workers increased at the same rate as urban rents until the Great Recession. Since then, however, rents have outpaced earnings by about 8 percent. So it makes sense that parental help with rent has increased over the past decade.

But there's an oddity here. Whenever I see an article like this, I always want to know "compared to what?" Has this really changed over time? Or have parents always helped their newly minted adult kids with the rent? So I clicked on the link to one of the studies mentioned in the article. Here's the primary finding:

This is a measure of all parental support, not just rent, and it's relatively stable until 2004, when it begins skyrocketing. So what happened? My first guess was that the housing bubble increased the cost of buying a house, which meant more 20-somethings were getting help from their parents with a down payment. But that would certainly count as "high support," which didn't increase. What's more, one of the defining features of the housing bubble was home loans with tiny down payment requirements. So that's probably not it.

The Great Recession makes sense as a starting point for increased parental assistance. But 2004? What happened then to kick off this trend?