UBS Warns America's Restaurants Locked In "Difficult Cycle" As Tax-Refund Sugar-High Fades

India Panics, Further Tightens Gold Flows As Rupee Collapses Well, that escalated quickly... With the Rupee accelerating its declines to ever lower record lows against the dollar, Indian authorities have stepped up capital controls, focusing on curbing demand in the gold 'exit' route. 4 days ago, there were no signs of import duty hikes as Prime Minister Narendra Modi  issued a rare weekend appeal urging citizens to forgo gold purchases as well as unnecessary foreign travel in order to help hold up the currency.. 2 days ago, tariffs were more than doubled on gold...

Standard Chartered To Replace "Lower-Value Human Capital" With AI As Meta Layoff D-Day Nears The white-collar job-loss apocalypse, accelerated by AI, is increasingly concentrated in repetitive, data-intensive, and digitally native roles, with tech firms announcing layoffs one after another. While 'D-Day' for Meta layoffs is Wednesday morning, the London-headquartered international bank Standard Chartered announced on Tuesday plans to cut 15% of its corporate roles (or about 7800 jobs) by 2030 as part of a broader efficiency push amid the adoption of AI. STAN also raised its profitability targets, aiming for a 15%...

March Jobs Shocker: Payrolls Soar By 178K Most Since 2024, Blowing Away All Estimates; Unemployment Rate Drops We titled our nonfarm payroll preview post "a substantial bounce" and boy were we right: with consensus expecting a material rebound from February's negative print (which was revised as usual worse, from -92K to -133K), what the BLS reported instead was a huge beat to expectations of a 65K increase, with March jobs reportedly rising by 178K, the biggest increase since December 2024. The number was driven entirely by a surge in private workers...