2024 Winding Down With No Major News or Data to Disturb the Occasion
December 30, 2024
The dollar slipped overnight by 0.3% against the euro and Canadian dollar and by 0.2% relative to the Japanese yen and pound sterling. Ten-year sovereign debt yields have dropped three basis points in the United States, two basis points in Japan and Italy, and a basis point in Germany, Great Britain, France and Spain. Bitcoin and oil are marginally firmer, and the price of gold is unchanged from Friday’s close. Equities are lower in most countries, marginally so for the most part but with a 1.0% loss in Japan (but 19.2% above its end-2023 level). Japanese markets will be closed tomorrow.
Price data reported around the world revealed
- Spanish CPI inflation printed at 2.8% for the third straight time this month, according to a preliminary estimate. Inflation in Euroland’s fourth biggest economy had imploded previously from 10.8% in July 2022 to as low as 1.5% in August of this year.
- A 7-month high 3.0% rate of Portuguese consumer price inflation in December, up from 2.5% in November and a 30-month low of 1.4% in December 2023 but well down from 10.1% in October 2022.
- CPI inflation in Slovenia also rose to a 7-month high (1.9%) Versus a 44-month low two months earlier and a 28.5-year high 11.0% in July 2022.
- Austrian producer price inflation (-2.0% in November) has been below zero percent since July 2023 in contrast to a record high of 22.1% in September 2022.
- Greek producer price inflation of -1.2% was negative for a fourth straight month in November but to a lesser degree than in the August-October.
- Bulgarian PPI inflation rose to a 3-month high of 1.1% last month after negative readings in September and October. Such peaked above 50% in September 2022.
November retail sales data were released in a number of countries. Such were 1.9% lower in South Korea than a year earlier; 2.7% higher in Latvia than a year earlier; up 5.8% on-year in Portugal; and up by 6.7% in Croatia.
Industrial production last month was 2.2% lower than a year earlier in Portugal but up 2.0% in Cyprus, 1.0% in Serbia and 0.1% in South Korea.
Russia’s composite and service-sector purchasing manager indices fell in December to a 2-month low of 51.1 and a 3-month low of 51.2, indicating modest growth in spite of the strains of war and sanctions.
Japan’s manufacturing PMI was revised 0.1 point higher than its preliminary estimate to a 4-month high of 49.6, indicating modest contraction.
The KOF Swiss business confidence index sank 3.4 points to a sub-100 score of 99.5 in December. That was over 1.5 points lower than forecast and the first sub-100 reading of 2024.
Turkish economic confidence has revived from August’s 4-yer low of 93.1 to a reading of 98.8 this month.
Finnish consumer sentiment weakened to a 7-month low in December and, at -8.6, has been lower than zero for the past 34 months.
The end of each calendar year tends to be a period of reflection but even more so than usual in 2024, for this milestone represents one fourth of the way between end-1999 and end-2099. It’s been quite a quarter century, marred early by the 9-11-01 terrorist attacks on the United States, the worst global financial market crisis since the Great Depression, costly yet unproductive wars in the Middle East and Africa, the worst global pandemic in a century, the political lurch to the right of the United States and several other western governments, and many world-changing technological advances. As the period winds down, the rapid emergence of AI, the development of a second and arguably much more dangerous and complicated cold war, and the comeback of Donald Trump’s revolutionary agenda are accelerating global anxiety. Oddly so, net dollar movements over this 25 years have been very small against the euro (-3.5%) and Canadian dollar (-0.8%). In contrast, the U.S. currency has climbed 54% versus the Japanese yen and 28% vis-a-vis sterling but dived by 43% relative to the Swiss franc. The DJIA has soared 276%, eclipsing cumulative gains of 187% in the German DAX and 111% in the Japanese Nikkei. Far in their wake has been the 17.5% rise of the British FTSE in a testament to the bad choice of taking that country out of the European Union.
Copyright 2024, Larry Greenberg. All rights reserved. No secondary distribution without express permission.
ShareThis
