Market Focus on Soft Global Economy
March 31, 2016
A little past noon in New York finds the dollar with scant change against the yen, sterling, and the Canadian and Aussie dollars, but the U.S. currency has slipped about a half percent vis-a-vis the euro and Swiss franc.
European stocks are down. North American Share prices are little changed. Japan’s Nikkei fell 0.7%.
The ten-year Treasury and British gilt yields have dropped two basis points, while the 10-year JGB rose six bps.
Oil and gold have climbed by 1.2% and 0.8%.
Two central banks (the Czech National Bank and the National Bank of Romania) left monetary policy settings unchanged, but the latter dropped hints of a tightening before midyear.
S&P changed the outlook associated with China’s credit rating to negative from stable. China’s 4Q15 current account surplus got revised upward by 8.6% to $91.9 billion, most of any quarter last year.
Consumer prices in the eurozone fell 0.1% in the year to March, matching the change in the previous twelve-month period to March 2015.
German retail sales volume dipped 0.4% last month, but the average in January-February was 0.6% greater than the 4Q15 mean.
German unemployment was unchanged in March after contracting 9K in February. Employment rose 0.1% on year in February.
Japanese stock and bond transactions last week generated a net JPY 3.35 trillion net capital outflow, only slightly less than JPY 3.82 trillion in the previous week.
In the year to February, Japanese housing starts climbed 7.8%, the largest 12-month advance since August, but construction orders fell 12.4% after a 13.8% on-year slide in January.
British GDP growth was revised up 0.1 percentage point to 0.6% in 4Q15, which matches 2Q for the strongest quarter last year. 2015 growth of 2.3% was the third straight year and the fourth in five years in which U.K. growth was at least 2.0%. Britain’s current account deficit swelled sharply in the final quarter of 2015 to a 67-year high of 7.0% of GDP from 4.3% of GDP in the third quarter and 5.2% on average in all of 2015.
British consumer confidence printed a second straight zero in March following readings of +2 in December and +4 in January.
M3 money grew 7.3% in the year to February in both New Zealand and Australia. Aussie new home sales leaped 29.4% on month in February, while New Zealand business sentiment fell 3.9 points to a reading of 3.2 in March.
Italian producer prices fell 3.5% in the year to February, a full percentage point more than in the prior year. Consumer prices in March were 0.2% lower than a year earlier.
In the year to 4Q15, Turkish real GDP growth accelerated to 5.7% and calendar year growth of 4.0% in 2015 was a full percentage point above the 2014 pace.
The Chicago manufacturing purchasing manufacturing index rebounded six points to a 2-month high of 53.6. Milwaukee’s PMI rose 2.6 points to 57.8.
U.S. new jobless insurance claims increased 12K to 276K last week, but the four-week average of 263.25K was down from a mean of 270.25K four weeks earlier and 284.75 in the four weeks to January 30.
Copyright 2016, Larry Greenberg. All rights reserved. No secondary distribution without express permission.
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