Fixed-income trading buoys National Bank’s capital-markets results + MORE Jun 1st

Google’s Android Pay, a mobile wallet that allows people to pay with their smartphone, is available for Canadians to download starting Wednesday.
Users can pay with the app in stores that accept contactless payment and on apps such as Uber and Lululemon that have an Android Pay button.
Android Pay will work with Visa and MasterCard credit cards from Bank of Montreal, CIBC, Scotiabank, National Bank, Desjardins, President’s Choice Financial, ATB Financial and Canadian Tire Financial Services.
On Monday, Google will start to roll out support for Interac cards from those banks.
Missing from the list of partners are TD Bank and Royal Bank, which both offer in-house digital wallets that are compatible with some Android devices.
Pali Bhat, vice-president of Google payments, said the company expects to add more banks to the pay system.
Android Pay comes to Canada more than a year after Apple Pay became available in the country.
The Android app, which is already in use in 11 other countries, will work on all NFC-enabled Android devices running on the operating system KitKat 4…

(Don Denton/CP)
The Toronto housing market was in a precarious place in the late 1980s. Prices had doubled in a short period, households were piling on debt and the market showed no signs of slowing down. That period represented a peak for Toronto (prices crashed in 1989) but by today’s standards, it looks absolutely quaint. The average home price was a mere $469,000, amounting to 5.4 times the average income. These days, the average home price is between seven and eight times income. To return to the ratio of the 1980s, the average household income has to jump to $160,000, or home prices have to fall back to $460,000.
There is a third possibility: this time is different. Maybe prices in Toronto and the surrounding suburbs really have reached a new normal, and a wide swath of people are permanently shut out of the market. “There is no particular reason housing has to be affordable for the average person,” wrote Ernest Wong last month, a research analyst with Baskin Wealth Management…

The Toronto stock market’s benchmark index was down in morning trading today amid falling oil prices.
The Toronto Stock Exchange’s S&P/TSX composite index was down 44.65 points to 15,327.70 after 90 minutes of trading.
The TSX energy subindex had one of the biggest declines, as the July crude contract dropped $1.68 to US$47.98 per barrel.
In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average lost 21.34 points to 21,008.13, the S&P 500 index shed 2.58 points to 2,410.33 and the Nasdaq composite index was down 11.06 points to 6,192.13.
The Canadian dollar was trading at 74.07 cents US, down from Tuesday’s average price of 74.24 cents US.
The July natural gas contract was down eight cents at US$3.07 per mmBTU, the August gold contract was up $4.30 to US$1,270.00 an ounce and the July copper contract was up one cent at US$2.57 a pound.
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‘We can’t complain, but the quarter is still very young,’ head of financial markets at institution says

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