One again it was a "good cop, bad cop" combination of the Markit and ISM service surveys.
First, it was Markit, which printed at the just barely expansionary Final March print 51.3, up from the preliminary 51.0, but the internals continued to deteriorate. As the chart below shows, and as the commentary confirms, the US service sector is barely hanging on by a thread.
Some of the highlights:
Must read thoughts from Richard Breslow, a former FX trader and fund manager who writes for Bloomberg
The Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco released a paper yesterday with a decidedly dour take on why market measures of inflation expectations remain in the tank. It’s a very relevant debate to have for several reasons.
China’s Gold Intent – ICBC Bank Reclassified as an LBMA Market Maker
ICBC Standard Bank, China and the world's largest bank, has been reclassified as a spot Market Making Member of the London Bullion Market Association (LBMA) with effect from today according to a note posted on the LBMA website last night at 2100 GMT.
According to the post:
"Still No Confidence In The Rally" - that's the title of the latest weekly BofA report looking at the buying and selling by its smart money clients (institutional clients, private clients and hedge funds), which finds that not only were sales by this group of clients last week the largest since September, and the fifth-largest in our data history, but this was the 10th consecutive week of selling as absolutely nobody believed this fakest of fake "rebounds" in recent history.
From BofA:
Valeant may be on the verge of a technical default as its lender demand not one but two pounds of flesh, it may be suffering imploding sales, it may have fired the entire salesforce for the female libido drug Addyi (which it acquired late last year), and it may be trying to pin all of its allegedly criminal book-cooking on its former CFO (who used to be a fromer head Goldman banker), the same CFO who refuses to resign from Valeant's board even though Valeant clearly wants him gone, but at least minutes ago, an ad hoc committee from Valeant's board (yes the same board where the former scapeg