Africa

Banks have been lobbying intensively against Brexit. Among those leading the charge is Goldman Sachs. For three years, the bank’s executives have publicly warned about the downsides of leaving the EU... and now we know why (hint - it's not concern for the common man).

As The Wall Street Journal reports, about a decade ago, Goldman launched project “Armada,” a plan for a hulking European headquarters on the site of an old telephone exchange in London.

Submitted by Rakesh Upadhyay via OilPrice.com,

OPEC-member Angola, which is dependent on oil for 95 percent of its export revenues, is facing an urgent cash flow problem, and the only way out is external help as the dominoes start to fall.

The latest confirmation of the pain global megabanks are suffering as a result of an abysmal trading environment, in no small part made even worse due to constant central bank tinkering, comes from Japan's largest brokerage, Nomura, which eight years after buying Lehman's European and Asian units has decided to fire 15% of its European staff and is abandoning most of its European equities business.

I’m even less of a Catholic than Alan Jacobs is – I’m not even a Christian, and I’m a pretty poor excuse for a Jew these days. Nonetheless, I want to say something about the debate about Amoris Laetitia apropos of Jacobs’s piece in these pages and Ross Douthat’s response.

At the beginning of May the planet Mercury is set to travel in front of the sun in a rare event that we will be able to see from Earth.  The planet will not travel between our planet and the sun again for another three and a half years. Businessinsider.com reports: Here’s everything you need to know to watch. The transit of Mercury occurs when Mercury passes between the Sun and Earth, and happens around 13 or 14 times each century. This year the event kicks off on May 9 just after 7am EDT (9pm AEST, 11am UTC), with the planet taking around 8 hours to make its glorious way across the Sun.