April 9, 2020
West Texas Intermediate crude oil rose 3.9%. Optimism is growing that Saudi Arabia and Russia will end their dispute over production cuts. Elsewhere among commodities, the price of gold advanced 1.5% overnight and is above $1,700 per ounce. Markets are gliding into the long Good Friday/Easter holiday. Mexico, New Zealand and Norway were shut this […] Read Article
April 6, 2020
Currency market participants are in an unprecedented period whose evolution will be decided foremost by an external factor involving a shock to the system in which even the experts have no first-hand experience. Although medical scientists have considerable familiarity dealing with other coronaviruses, there hasn’t been a respiratory pandemic in the last 102 years to […] Read Article
April 9, 2020
The National Bank of Serbia’s policy rate was sliced by 25 basis points today to 1.5%. Previous cuts were engineered of 50 basis points in March and 25 bps each in July, August and November of 2019. “Indicators from the international environment signal that the negative effects of the virus on global economic growth are […] Read Article
April 2, 2020
New weekly jobless insurance claims, which are a proxy for layoffs, shot up by a much greater-than-forecast 6.648 million workers. This was the second big overshoot in a row, yielding a 2-week total of 9.955 million. The weekly average of new claims in the first two months of 2020 had been 212-3/8K, by comparison. As […] Read Article
April 8, 2020
Poland’s central bank reference rate has been halved to 0.50% and henceforth will be surrounded by a zero percent deposit rate and a 1.0% Lombard rate. There had been an initial monetary policy response to Covid-19 on March 17, including a 50-basis point interest rate cut, liquidity injections via repo operations, and a program of […] More
April 8, 2020
Finance ministers in the euro area for a second time failed to secure a deal that would coordinate their response against the coronavirus pandemic. They will try again later. The Bank of France revised its forecast of French real GDP growth in the first quarter of 2020 from +0.1% to negative 6%, which would make […] More
April 7, 2020
Share prices in Asia closed up 9.0% in India, 4.1% in Singapore, 2.1% in China and Hong Kong, 2.0% in Japan and 1.8% in South Korea and Taiwan. Equity markets so far in Europe show additional gains today of 4.3% in Italy, 4.0% in Germany, 3.1% in France, 3.5% in Spain and 3.0% in the […] More
April 6, 2020
The Bank of Israel’s monetary policy rate has been lowered back to the low of 0.10% that prevailed from January 2015 until a 15-basis point increase in late November 2018. Previously, the rate had crested at 3.25% prior to 2011 but was lowered by 75 basis points per year over four consecutive calendar years through […] More
April 6, 2020
Stock markets in the Pacific Rim rallied 4.3% in Australia, 4.2% in Japan and South Korea, 4.1% in Indonesia, 2.2% in Hong Kong, and 1.6% in Taiwan. China and India did not partake in this rebound as those markets were closed Monday for the Ching Ming Festival and Mahavir Jayanti Holiday. Equities in Europe have […] More
April 3, 2020
Central Banks: Monetary policy reviews are scheduled in Israel, Australia, Poland, Serbia and South Korea. Also know that during the Covid-19 crisis, central bank policies have been modified frequently after unscheduled meetings. FOMC minutes will be published, and so will the Bank of Canada’s Business Outlook Survey. Holidays and Other Notes of Interest: Mahavir Jayanti […] More
April 3, 2020
The Monetary Board at the Central Bank of Sri Lanka held an emergency session today in which members agreed to cut the Standing Deposit Facility rate to 6.0% from 6.25% and the Standing Lending Facility rate also by 25 basis points to 7.0%. Just 18 days earlier also at an unscheduled meeting, these rates were […] More
April 3, 2020
The U.S. monthly labor force survey for March could have been worse because of the release’s disclaimer that “the survey reference periods predated many coronavirus-related business and school closures that occurred in the second half of the month.” That being said, non-farm payroll employment plunged 701K, most since April 2009. A drop of 701,000 jobs […] More
April 2, 2020
The Central Bank of Chile Board authorized a 50-basis point reduction of its policy interest rate on March 31 by unanimous vote just two weeks after an emergency meeting that cut such by 75 basis points on the 16th. In the second half of 2019, officials had also engineered cuts of 50 basis ponts in […] More
April 2, 2020
The stage for this week’s renewed financial market pessimism had been set a week ago when the Labor Department reported a record 3.283K upsurge in new jobless insurance claims for the week of March 21st, and now investors are bracing for an even greater increase of close to 4 million or more. The U.S. advance […] More
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