London whale rocks JPMorgan's boat

• As the most vocal critic of regulatory reform, surely even Jamie Dimon discovered humility when forced to discuss JPMorgan's $2-billion trading loss. He called the failed hedging strategy "stupid", "egregious", "poorly executed and poorly managed", and said it all violated "the Dimon Principle" (whatever that is). That's all great colour, now we need someone to explain synthetic credit, why it's used, and how the trading desk choked on it.

• How widely will this reverberate across the financial sector? Does this lead to more stringent risk oversight? How quickly would Jamie Dimon's peers have stormed off to make sure their investment gurus haven't stepped in the same pile?

• I'd like to know how this plays out in Washington, where Dodd-Frank implementation continues. Has Jamie Dimon lost any right to protest regulations? And what happens next time he's face-to-face with Mark Carney?

• The overnight data dump from China shows slowing activity across the board. Retail sales and industrial production slipped from March, and came in below expectations. Inflation ticked down to 3.4 percent from 3.6 percent. Should the rest of the world brace for continued deceleration, or will leaders in Beijing deliver a jolt?

• Our top story is the StatsCan's jobs report, which showed that Canada added 58,200 jobs in April, mostly full-time. That comes on top of the gobsmacking growth of 82,300 in March and beats forecasts for just 10,000 new positions in April. We'll monitor what Jim Flaherty has to say during his media avail later this morning.

• We're waiting for word from Madrid on what the Spanish government is doing to shore up the banking system. We expect to hear banks will have to set aside approximately 30 billion euros to insulate themselves from losses linked to real estate assets. The question becomes how much the government will need to kick in to help the banks meet those requirements.

• The European Commission is warning of a possible "renewed aggravation of the crisis", and expects the 17-nation euro zone will suffer through a recession this year, before the economy grows 1 percent in 2013. Do policymakers have the will to succeed in their efforts to stabilize the economy, or are they destined for more bickering and band-aid solutions?

• Which brings us to Greece, where Evangelos Venizelos is on the clock to form a coalition government. By the end of this weekend, we should know whether Athens is tracking toward another election. We need to cover scenarios today. What is Venizelos's plan for managing austerity and bailout terms if he cobbles together a coalition? If Greece bails on the currency bloc, what happens to its euro-denominated debts, and how quickly will investors put another country in the crosshairs?

• The aforementioned Carney, incidentally, is swinging back in an FT op-ed against critics who are urging central banks to shore up the economy, even if it imperils their mandates. Keep that in mind next time we hear someone push the ECB to dish out more cash.

• But it's not all macro. We've seen TMX Group fall short of expectations, as profit tumbled 22 percent in the first quarter. CEO Tom Kloet joins us at 3:30 p.m. ET to run through the numbers and discuss long-term strategy as the Maple deal simmers.

Every morning Managing Editor Marty Cej writes a "chase note" to BNN's editorial staff listing the stories and events that will be in the spotlight that day. In Marty's absence today's note was written by BNN's assignment editor Noah Zivitz.