Video: Trump promises to roll back bank regulations + MORE May 1st

President Donald Trump told a group of community bankers that he will roll back regulations imposed on their industry after the nation's 2008 financial crisis.

REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File
On Thursday, Facebook’s security team released a short report updating its expansion of its focus “from traditional abuse behavior, such as account hacking, malware, spam and financial scams, to include more subtle and insidious forms of misuse, including attempts to manipulate civic discourse and deceive people.” In other words: so-called ‘fake news’.
In the report’s brief case study on the 2016 U.S. election, Facebook admits that it responded to “several situations” that it assessed “fit the pattern of information operations”, which Facebook defines as “actions taken by governments or organized non-state actors to distort domestic or foreign political sentiment, most frequently to achieve a strategic and/or geopolitical outcome.”
Those actors, Facebook says, use what it calls “false amplification” – a “coordinated activity by inauthentic accounts with the intent of manipulating political discussion”. Interestingly, Facebook specifies that most of that false amplification of posts is not due to “bots”, or automated processes, but rather “by coordinated people who are dedicated to operating inauthentic accounts…

Have you seen the latest rates being offered on guaranteed investment certificates (GICs). No? I’ll save you the trouble: They’re pitiful. But they still have a place in your portfolio.
Scoff at the interest rates all you want, but there’s something to be said about owning an investment that’s going to protect your principal and deliver a guaranteed return. They certainly won’t be the sexiest part of your portfolio, but they serve an important function.
“We use them all the time,” says Dan Bortolotti, an associate portfolio manager with PWL Capital. His rationale is simple: “What’s the alternative?” Bonds also aren’t particularly attractive right now and loading up on equities over GICs, is a non-starter. Investors need to remember that GICs and equities perform different functions in a balanced portfolio; you can’t simply swap one for the other.
Bortolotti can appreciate the derision investors have towards for the low-rates offered on GICs. “A lot of times they are misunderstood,” he says…

It’s been a bad season for investment research.  Just a few weeks ago allegations were levelled that a long-running study of poor investor behaviour got the math wrong. Now it appears research supporting the notion that dividend growth provides an edge to investors may have suffered a similar fate.

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The latest controversy comes courtesy of money manager Meb Faber, who recently alleged that Ned Davis Research’s study of dividend growth was “wrong, incomplete, and misleading.”
Faber says, “It turns out that Ned Davis (whom we love more than any quant shop on the planet) had been calculating the returns in an incorrect manner. (It may not be accurate to say “incorrect,” but the weighting method isn’t used by anyone else in the industry and NDR has since updated the charts to standardized formulas.)”
He then reported Ned Davis’ revised figures. Instead of outperforming by a large margin since 1973, dividend growers returned 12.89% annually while all dividend payers gained 12…

U.S. President’s comments could give a push to efforts to revive the Glass-Steagall law that separated commercial lending from investment banking