Bradley Birkenfeld is one of the most significant financial whistleblowers of all time, so you might think he’d be cheering on the disclosures in the new Panama Papers leaks. However, Birkenfeld is raising questions about the source of the information that is currently shaking political regimes around the world and believes the hacking of the Panama City-based firm, called Mossack Fonseca, could have been done by the U.S.
Perhaps the biggest farce to result from the Dodd-Frank legislation designed to "rein in" banks was the ridiculous notion of "living wills" - a concept that makes zero sense in an environment where the failure of even one bank assures a systemic crisis and could - as the Lehman financial crisis showed - lead to the collapse of all other interlinked financial institutions.
Business inventory-to-sales ratio pushes to new deeply recessionary cycle highs at 1.41x...
As inventories met expectations of a modest 0.1% drop MoM in February but sales tumbled 0.4%.
Auto inventories rose 1.3% - the most since Sept 2015 (but sales were unchanged as opposed to +1.4% in Sept 2015). The breakdown is ugly across the board...
Q1 GDP takes a double whammy as not only did inventories drop (and recent gains were revised lower) but sales tumbled.
After stumbling sideways around unch MoM for 3 months, US retail sales tumbled 0.3% in March (considerably worse than the 0.1% MoM gain expected) confirming BofA's credit card data as we warned. March's print is practically the weakest month since Feb 2015 and is unlikely to get much better given the dismally weak start to April, as we noted here. After 3 months of low-base bounce in YoY retail sales, March saw it collapse back to just 1.7% YoY - deep in recession territory.
March Retail Sales plunge...
Last week, I heard that Jim Rickards had a new book out, called ‘The new case for gold’. I immediately ordered a copy, and I have to say, Mr. Rickards does an excellent job of refuting various myths surrounding gold, and more specifically laying out a groundwork for the role of gold in the global financial system in the future. This book is recommended.