United States

Preface 1: One of the reasons that voters like Sanders and Trump is because they oppose fake "free trade" deals, which help a handful of fatcats ... but have almost nothing to do with "free trade", and which hurt the American worker.

Preface 2: I'm for consistency ... either we ALL get to hide our money from taxing authorities, or none of us should be able to.

Barack Obama pushed the trade deal with Panama which allowed the tax evasion revealed by the "Panama Papers" to flourish.  Huffington Post reported in 2011:

In what he assures will be "an easy decision," Donald Trump has released details of his plan to "compel Mexico to pay for the wall." In a 600 word statement, Trump proposes, in a potentially devastating move for Mexico’s economy, to block billions of dollars in payments immigrants send back home until the nation made "a one-time payment of $5-10 billion" to the U.S.

Let’s face it: in times of war, the Constitution tends to take a beating. With the safety or survival of the nation said to be at risk, the basic law of the land—otherwise considered sacrosanct—becomes nonbinding, subject to being waived at the whim of government authorities who are impatient, scared, panicky, or just plain pissed off.

With media attention squarely falling on the foreigners exposed by the Panama Papers offshore tax haven scandal, everyone has been asking for more information on who are the Americans involved in this biggest data leak in history. After all, as we showed, Mossack Fonseca had over 400 American clients. But who are they?

Today, courtesy of McClatchy, we get some answers: while there are no politicians of note are in files but plenty of others. Among them: Retirees, scammers, and tax evaders, all of whom found a use for secrecy of offshore companies.

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: