United States

On Friday, the US government's Bureau of Economic Analysis had some good and some not so good news: the good news was that the final estimate of Q4 GDP was revised higher from 1.0% to 1.4% (driven by an odd rebound in spending on Transportation and Recreational services). The bad news was that pre-tax earnings tumbled 7.8%, the most since the first quarter of 2011, after a 1.6 percent decrease in the previous three months, suggesting that while it is only the "strong" US consumer that is keeping the US economy afloat on their shoulders.

Having spent a couple of days glad-handing (and watching baseball) with Raul Castro in Cuba, 89-year-old Fidel Castro has come out swinging against "the empire" with a bristling 1500-word open letter recounting the history of US aggression against Cuba suggesting Obama "reflects and doesn't try to develop theories about Cuban politics." Despite all of The White House's claims of progress, Castro rages "we don't need the empire to give us any presents."

With European markets closed across the continent on Monday as the Easter holiday continues, overnight Asia was busy with the Shanghai Composite letting off some steam, and closing down 0.7% at session lows on concerns the Shanghai and Shenzhen home bubble have been popped prematurely by the politburo.

Leon Hadar does a good job making some sense out of Trump’s recent rambling interviews on foreign policy with The New York Times and Washington Post:

We should reassess the American role in NATO and the rationale for continuing to maintain it. But Trump needs to explain to us why we need to do that, not like a technocrat going through the books but as a political leader with coherent vision of the role the U.S. should play in the world. We do foreign policy not to make a profit but in order to protect the country and advance its interests.

On Thursday, March 24, the 40th anniversary of the last Argentine coup d’état, a large crowd filled Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires with shouts of “nunca más,” “never again.” They were referring to the U.S.-supported Argentine military dictatorship of 1976-1983 and the repression that characterized it: the imprisonment, torture, and murder of political opposition on a mass scale. “Never again,” then, to such oppression, and “never again” to the overthrow of democracy—the last coup was the sixth in Argentina’s brief history. But President Obama’s visit to Argentina, the first such U.S.