Juggling Dynamite

While plenty of client entertainment takes place on Wall Street, traders and brokers say such activity is even more prevalent in London.

“In the U.S., the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority, a Wall Street self-regulatory organization, imposes a limit of $100 per person per year on gifts or other spending by brokers designed to score more business or better terms. Finra says dinners and other business entertainment don’t count toward this limit, provided they are “neither so frequent nor so extensive as to raise any question of propriety.”

No such limit exists in the U.K.”

WSJ’s David Enrich looks at how the London brokerage industry goes to great lengths to curry favor with top traders. The brokerage industry’s efforts to woo traders range from taking them to fancy dinners to sometimes providing them with cocaine and prostitutes to allegedly helping them manipulate a key global interest rate.Here is a direct link.

A quirky visual presentation reminding of the ticking demographic bomb facing Europe (and China, Japan and the UK and to a lesser but still significant degree, North America). Here is a direct link.

Global PMI Manufacturing has been in a pronounced downtrend since 2010 regardless of manic liquidity injections from Central Banks. Today we learned that Canadian Manufacturing continued its flat line in April at 50.1 after 49.3 in March (below 50 being an indication of official contraction), 50.6 in China, 36.7 in Australia! Below we see a portrait of US PMI Manufacturing since 2004, which came in today at a barely beating 50.7 in April from 51.3 in March.

This lends support to a US recessionary reading coming from Nominal GDP which in Q1 came in at 3.4%. Readings below 3.7% on nominal US GDP have only been seen in recessions, and Q1 was the second quarter in a row of this indication of economic contraction.

Source: ECRI

I know, none of this matters because the Fed has our back…right. The 60 trillion dollar global economy is falling backwards at increasing velocity (despite 5 years of Central Bank antics) and Ben and his academic buds are promising to catch our fall.  Why worry?

Here is another useful glimpse at the 70% consumer-driven US economy.  Retail sales collapsing since 2012 like they did in 2008. But, who needs customers, right?

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