United States

In the latest verbal fireworks involving the Pacific Rim's most unstable nation, overnight North Korea accused the CIA and the South Korea National Intelligence service of supporting a terrorist cell plotting to kill its "supreme leadership" with a bio-chemical weapon and said such a "pipe-dream" could never succeed.

According to AFP, the North's Ministry of State Security released a statement saying "the last-ditch effort" of U.S. "imperialists" and the South had gone "beyond the limits."

With all eyes on crude, following last night's mini flash crash which sent WTI lower by 3% from just above $45 to under $43 in under 10 minutes, equity markets, generally quiet overnight, have taken on a secondary importance ahead of today's key risk event, the April payrolls report (full preview here). In global equities, Asian and European stocks are lower, while S&P futures are little changed.

Whether we’re discussing the ancient merchants that traversed the legendary Silk Road, or the transfer of goods across modern border lines, trade has always been about building close relationships.

As Visual Capitalist's Jeff Desjardins notes, there are many examples of strong and mutually-beneficial trade relationships all throughout history, but one doesn’t have to look far back to find what could be considered the closest bilateral relationship ever known: the one between the United States and Canada.

Authored by John Solomon via Circa.com,

During his final year in office, President Obama's team significantly expanded efforts to search National Security Agency intercepts for information about Americans, distributing thousands of intelligence reports across government with the unredacted names of U.S. residents in the midst of a divisive 2016 presidential election.

The spread between "hard" and "soft", or survey and sentiment data, ever since the election has been extensively noted and discussed on this website in recent months (especially since over the past two months the soft data has rolled decisively over, while the Citi economic surprise index has crashed at the fastest pace on record). Which is why it will come as no surprise to readers that, as Goldman writes in a note looking at "Peak Sentiment", over the past six months, US “sentiment surveys” have outpaced both “activity surveys” and “hard data”.