Everything You Need to Know on Tuesday: TD Bribery Woes Spread to Florida as New Allegations Surface

Good morning mooers! Here are things you need to know about today's market:

● S&P/TSX 60 Index Standard Futures are trading at 1,317.70, down 0.52%

● New policies driving economic growth could solve Canada's productivity emergency, says RBC

● Natural gas sales in May were impacted by reduced nominations from Bahiagas resulting from temporary reductions in consumer demand, Alvopetro Energy says.

● TD bribery woes spread to Florida as new allegations surface

Today, the Canadian dollar is trading at 73.13 cents US, a slight decrease from Monday.

S&P/TSX 60 Index Standard Futures are trading at 1,317.70, down 0.52% from previous close.

One way to resolve Canada’s declining productivity may be to just drop the “technical term” from conversations and simply focus on creating policies that can help the economy grow, according to one Royal Bank of Canada economist.

These policies include things such as cutting red tape and internal trade barriers, making better use of immigrants' skills, adopting new technologies and making tax policies more attractive for investment, said Nathan Janzen, the bank’s deputy chief economist, who published a report on Tuesday that detailed ways to improve the country’s productivity levels.

“Looking at some of the solutions to Canada’s productivity gap, you don’t really need to talk about productivity,” he said. “These are the kinds of things we should be doing even if we had the strongest productivity levels in the world.”

He said productivity is a technical term that economists worry about as opposed to the general public, so “some of the urgency gets lost.”

Canada’s declining labour productivity has received plenty of attention after Bank of Canada senior deputy Carolyn Rogers in March said the country needs to tackle its poor efficiency numbers to inoculate the economy against future inflation.

“You’ve seen those signs that say, ‘In emergency, break glass,’ well, it’s time to break the glass,” she said in a speech on March 26.

Gerry Aquino Vargas, the now-former retail banker in a Hollywood, Florida, outpost of Canada’s second-largest bank, falsified documents to open dozens of accounts and provided concierge-like services to help cash flow across borders, according to American prosecutors. In another recent case, a former TD branch employee in New York admitted to bypassing the bank’s compliance measures to defraud a customer.

The cases — which haven’t yet been reported and don’t identify Toronto-Dominion by name — are part of a sweeping probe by officials at the U.S. Justice Department, bank regulators and U.S. Treasury Department into allegations of money laundering and other financial crimes at the bank. The dragnet may ultimately lead to a costly settlement for TD that some analysts now peg at US$2 billion and, perhaps worse for the firm’s investors, a yearslong setback for its lofty U.S. ambitions.