United States

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:

Days before the ICIJ released this weekend's trove of "Panama Papers" international tax haven data involving Panamaian law firm Mossack Fonseca, Bloomberg conducted an interview on March 29 with the two founding lawyers. In it, it found that even before the full leak was about to be made semi-public (any of the at least 441 US clients are still to be disclosed), the Panama law firm knew that the game was already largely over.

• Panama Papers: Biggest Banks Are Top Users of Offshore Services (WSJ)
• Panama Papers probes opened, China limits access to news on leaks (Reuters)
• Credit Suisse CEO Distances Bank From ‘Panama Papers’ (WSJ)
• Fed's Evans says market more pessimistic on U.S. rate hikes (Reuters)
• IMF's Lagarde Says Risks to Weak Global Recovery Are Increasing (BBG)
• New U.S. inversion rules threaten Pfizer-Allergan deal (Reuters)
• Time Is Running Out (Again) for Greece (BBG)

Yesterday's stunning announcement by the US Treasury, which released a report titled  "Treasury Announces Additional Action to Curb Inversions, Address Earnings Stripping", and which was clearly aimed at ending not only all tax inversions, but the biggest pharma M&A deal in history, Pfizer's tax-inverting takeover of Allergan (pardon Actavis) hit AGN like a ton of bricks, sending the stock crashing 20%.