Business

Social-media company Foursquare has crunched the data generated by its 50 million active monthly users and determined that America’s share of the international tourism market has fallen sharply since October.

According to data published on the company’s blog, visits by foreigners to the U.S.  started to decline in October, when they fell by 6% year-over-year. The decline has continued through March 2017, the latest month for which Foursquare has data, when visits declined by an astounding 16%.

To the list of 'rigged' markets (e.g. Libor, FX, Silver, Treasuries...) we can now add VIX (which explains a lot) as two University of Texas at Austin finance professors find "large transient deviations in VIX prices" around the morning auction, "consistent with market manipulation."

It appears the Fed's balance sheet "trial balloons" using primary dealers as intermediaries have begun.

Confident anchors across the media have been proudly proclaiming the rise above $50 as proof that the oil market is heading toward equilibrium again and OPEC's production cut deal extension will be awesome... except the market seems to be disappointed as it's clear no other non-OPEC nations will join the agreement (cough US shale cough) and "sell the news" has sent crude back below $50...

The full details are as follows:

General Motors' stock price is tumbling after reports that the carmaker is accused of putting defeat devices in its trucks to beat emissions tests, becoming the sixth carmaker accused of diesel cheating since 2015, when Volkswagen AG admitted to installing software to bypass pollution rules.

Bloomberg reports that People who own or lease more than 705,000 GM Duramax diesel trucks filed a class-action lawsuit Thursday, claiming GM installed multiple such devices in two models of heavy-duty trucks from 2011 to 2016.