deadhorseblogging

As far as credit markets are concerned, U.S. stock investors have lost touch with reality.

That’s seen in the extra yield bond investors demand over Treasuries. The spread has expanded by 0.48 percentage point from a year ago, the most since 2012, even as the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index rallied.

While not without precedent, instances when anxiety in bonds didn’t seep into equities are rare. More than 70 per cent of the time since 1996, as spreads widened as much as they have since April, the S&P 500 has fallen, with the average decline exceeding 10 per cent, data compiled by Bloomberg show.

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“This is something that sooner or later is going to impact the stock market,” said Russ Koesterich, global chief investment strategist at New York-based BlackRock Inc., which oversees US$4.7 trillion. “Credit market conditions have not been benign and easy as were they were last…

Special Report: State Department watered down human trafficking report | Reuters.

It’s good business to keep your trading partners out of trouble.

“In the weeks leading up to a critical annual U.S. report on human trafficking that publicly shames the world’s worst offenders, human rights experts at the State Department concluded that trafficking conditions hadn’t improved in Malaysia and Cuba. And in China, they found, things had grown worse.

The State Department’s senior political staff saw it differently — and they prevailed.

A Reuters examination, based on interviews with more than a dozen sources in Washington and foreign capitals, shows that the government office set up to independently grade global efforts to fight human trafficking was repeatedly overruled by senior American diplomats and pressured into inflating assessments of 14 strategically important countries in this year’s Trafficking in Persons report.”

See ‘The World is a Business‘ rant from…

Banks were supposed to be frightened of Bitcoin. Last year, in a commentary for Fortune called “Why banks fear Bitcoin,” MIT business professor Trond Undheim wrote that “banks are afraid of Bitcoin because it would force them to innovate.”

[np_storybar title=”Information overload stymies Canada’s banks in mobile payments battleground: ‘Things are changing so quickly’” link=”http://business.financialpost.com/fp-tech-desk/information-overload-stymies-canadas-banks-in-mobile-payments-battleground-things-are-changing-so-quickly”]

As banks aim to stake their ground in the burgeoning mobile payments market, a U.K.-based software company says its efforts in Canada are being stymied by the hazards of innovation.

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The mysterious inventor of Bitcoin, Satoshi Nakamoto, specifically challenged the idea of trusting banks as one of his justifications for creating the currency. “Banks must be trusted to hold our money and transfer it electronically, but they lend it out in waves of credit bubbles with barely a fraction in reserve,” he wrote in 2009. “We have to trust them with our…