Business

News that Goldman purchased some $2.8 billion in Venezuela bonds issued by state oil company PDVSA and until recently held by Venezuela's central bank - at a 30% discount to market, paying 31 cents on the dollar or around $865 million in notional - quickly set off a firestorm of angry protests, in which Goldman was accused of making money from other people's misery (even though the story of Goldman's involvement in Venezuela's debt is hardly new, as we reported in 2014 in "How Goldman Sachs Became Broke Venezuela's Loan Shark"

One month ago, we first presented several striking charts and observations from Credit Suisse's retail analyst, Christian Buss, who showed the extent of the devastation sweeping through the US retail sector.

To be sure, while the mass shuttering of retail stores - just today Michael Kors announced the company would close up to 125 full-price retail stores - has been a recurrent topic on this website as shown in the chart below...

US Macro data at its worst since Feb 2016, 2017 lows for EPS Expectations, Record Highs for Nasdaq... "inconceivable"

As part of its periodic Global Economic Outlook, SocGen traditionally includes a discussion of what it views are the biggest "black swans" both to the upside and the downside, and the latest just released edition titled "On a Plateau", which took a rather grim outlook to the world economy predicting that a US recession will likely hit in the not too distant future while "China, South Korea, Australia, US, Germany, UK and Japan are in the more mature phase of the cycle", and that current global growth is "essentially as good as it gets"...

... was no different. 

When the Fed released last month's Beige Book, as part of the explanation why employers are having an increasingly more difficult time finding jobs, it presented the following disturbing anecdote from a Boston Fed respondent: