European Parliamentary Election Results Trickling In
May 27, 2019
The dollar is little changed. U.S. markets will be shut for Memorial Day, and British markets were closed for the late Spring banking holiday.
Britain’s makeshift Brexit Party whose agenda consists solely of taking the country out of the EU as soon as possible and at any cost easily captured the biggest British slice of voter support in EU parliamentary elections, that being 31.17%. The Liberal Democrats also outpolled Prime Minister May’s Conservative Party. Across Europe, political centrists were the biggest losers, as popular support shifted to both the Greens and far-right parties. Spanish Socialists took about a third of that country’s vote, and the pro-independence Scottish National Party easily outperformed Labour.
U.S. President Trump is out of the country on this Memorial Day. From Japan, he indicated a continuing unreadiness to do a trade deal yet with China and characterized former VP Biden, the leading presidential candidate in Democratic opinion polls, as a man of low IQ.
Japan’s March indices of leading, coincident, and lagging economic indicators were revised downward to 35-, 31- and 3-month lows, respectively.
Chinese corporate profits reverted to an on-year decline in April, this time of 3.7%, after breaking a string of such drops in March.
The governor of the Bank of Japan said there is a need for global leaders to discuss economic imbalances. Japan will be hosting a meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bank heads early next month.
Hong Kong’s trade deficit shrunk 25% year-on-year to HKD 35.1 billion in April. There was a January-April deficit of HKD 47 billion, 13 billion less than a year earlier.
Danish retail sales dipped 0.3% last month but recorded the largest 12-month rate of increase (3.2%) in half a year.
Finnish consumer confidence weakened 0.1 index point to a two month low of -1.8 in May. Aside from April, that was the strongest level since November.
At 5.6%, Polish unemployment was its lowest in 18-1/2 years, down from 5.9% in March and 6.3% in April of 2018.
In stock market action overnight, share prices jumped by 1.4% in China, 0.7% in Indonesia, 0.6% in India and 0.3% in Japan. European bourses so far show gains of 0.6% in Spain and Italy, 0.5% in Germany and Switzerland, and 0.2% in France.
There hasn’t been much movement in gold or oil prices today.
The 10-year German bund yield slid two basis points, while its Japanese counterpart edged a basis point higher.
Copyright 2019, Larry Greenberg. All rights reserved. No secondary distribution without express permission.
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