Axios

Viacom and AT&T settled a contract dispute early Monday that threatened to black out Viacom-owned cable channels like MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon for AT&T's 24 million TV customers in the U.S..

The big picture: AT&T demanded lower fees, while Viacom charged the telecom giant with abusing its market power after its merger with Time Warner gave it more clout.

Factory activity in the eurozone contracted at the fastest pace in nearly six years.

The state of play: The bloc's aggregate PMI fell to 47.6 in March from 49.3, well below the 50 threshold that is the baseline for whether the sector is expanding or contracting. In Germany, Europe's largest economy, new orders fell to the lowest level in a decade. And, in France, both manufacturing and service sector PMIs are now in the red.

Following the inversion of the U.S. Treasury yield curve, developed market government bond yields are all moving lower as investors seek safe havens.

What's happening: German 10-year bond yields fell below zero for the first time since 2016. Japan's 10-year yield is near -0.10, the lowest since 2016. Australia's 10-year bond yield fell to an all-time low of 1.772% and New Zealand's 10-year bond also hit its lowest level on record.

Measuring the extent of global counterfeiting is one of the hardest jobs in economics.

Up until a few years ago, it had never been seriously attempted: In 2005, I wrote a 3,000-word blog post titled "All counterfeiting statistics are bullshit." Back then, it was generally accepted that counterfeiting accounted for about 6% of global trade, although no one had a clue where that number came from.

It's rare to see Wall Street fees come down — but when it comes to fund managers, that's exactly what's happening, at a quite astonishing pace.

Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi posts an emergency chapter of "Hate Inc.: How, And Why, The Press Makes Us Hate One Another," which he calls a "serial book, delivered by email."

His provocative thesis: "WMD damaged the media’s reputation. Russiagate may have destroyed it."