the consumer is maxed out

Sales at U.S. retailers unexpectedly fell in March, raising concern consumer spending is losing momentum.
The 0.3 percent drop in purchases followed little change the prior month, Commerce Department figures showed Wednesday in Washington. The median forecast of 81 economists surveyed by Bloomberg called for a 0.1 percent gain.
Sustained gains in consumer spending, the biggest part of the economy, are needed at a time exports are still depressed by cooling global markets and U.S. manufacturing is barely emerging from a slump.

Coal giant goes bankrupt

U.S. coal giant Peabody Energy Corp. filed for bankruptcy on Wednesday, the most powerful convulsion yet in an industry that’s enduring the worst slump in decades.
The company filed Chapter 11 petitions for most of its U.S. entities in federal court in St. Louis, listing $10.1 billion in debt.

IMF warns about global economy

Global policy makers need to guard against a self-reinforcing “spiral” of weakening growth and rising debt that could require a coordinated response by the world’s major economies, according to the IMF’s top fiscal watchdog.
Most countries are on a higher debt path than they were a year ago, the International Monetary Fund said in its semi-annual Fiscal Monitor report released Wednesday. Fiscal deficits in 2015-2016 in emerging economies are projected to exceed levels during the global financial crisis, as countries struggle with low oil prices, cooling investor sentiment and intensifying geopolitical tensions...
Advanced economies, meantime, are facing the “triple threat” of low growth, low inflation, and high public debt, the fund said.

big banks living wills are rejected

JPMorgan Chase & Co., Bank of America Corp. and three other major U.S. banks failed to persuade regulators they could go bankrupt without disrupting the broader financial system and could now face a tighter leash from Washington after government agencies used one of the most significant post-crisis powers bestowed under the Dodd-Frank Act.
The banks -- also including Wells Fargo & Co., Bank of New York Mellon Corp. and State Street Corp. -- must scrap their resolution plans, or living wills, after the Federal Reserve and the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. said versions submitted last year failed to satisfy their requirements. The lenders will have until Oct. 1 to rewrite the plans -- but under the pressure that another failure would give regulators power to subject them to more capital, liquidity or constraints on their businesses.

Obamacare not working as advertised

Well, the hammer has fallen: The largest health insurer in the U.S. has started pulling out of select Obamacare exchanges.
Five months ago UnitedHealth, which had been singing sunny songs to investors about its bright future on the exchanges, abruptly began crooning the blues. In an earnings call barely a month after executives assured investors that all was going swimmingly, they confessed that they were losing a ton of money on their Obamacare policies and described a pattern that sounded as if consumers were gaming the system -- signing up for a few months, using a ton of services, and then canceling their policies. If this continued, they said, they would have no choice but to pull out of the exchange business....
For example, Alaska’s exchange seems to be tumbling towards collapse, with essentially one and a half insurers. (Moda Health, the second insurer, has had financial troubles that leave its future uncertain.) Rates rose almost 40 percent last year, putting the benchmark silver plan at around $720 a month for a 40-year-old nonsmoker in Anchorage. Wyoming is down to a single insurer, and the uninsured rate has actually increased since 2013, presumably in part because the state has some of the highest premiums in the country. So does Vermont, which is now down to two insurers. Mapping a one-size-fits-all national policy onto low-population rural states seems to be a recipe for some problems.

CIA plasns to flood Syria with weapons

According to officials familiar with the situation, the CIA has been drawing up a “plan B” for the collapse of the peace talks, which will see a massive new influx of US weapons to “moderate” rebel factions, in another attempt to shift the war in favor of those groups.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because the CIA already had programs for arming “vetted” rebel factions earlier in the civil war, programs which ended with those groups no more powerful, and large amounts of US weapons winding up in the hands of ISIS and al-Qaeda’s Nusra Front.
“Plan B,” then, is really just America’s long-standing plan A, which has already failed, rebranded with a different letter, because nominally the US has to pretend it believes in the peace process it’s so eagerly planning for the collapse of.
The same plan, only moreso, as officials say the CIA is also planning to send even more powerful anti-aircraft weapons to the rebel factions, with an eye toward shooting down Syrian warplanes.
And Russian ones.