As of Thu, Dec 13, 08:00 GMT (UTC +08:00)
USDJPY, +0.26%, $113.57.
EURUSD, -0.04%, $1.1363.
GBPUSD, +0.18%, $1.2654.
S&P500, -0.02%, 2,650.54
Nasdaq, -0.39%, 7,070.33
Nikkei Futures, -0.22%, 21,612.5
CURRENCY MARKET WRAP
- U.S. Unemployment Claims at 206K vs expected 226K. Import Prices m/m at -1.6% vs expected -1.0%, the takeaway from the report is that inflation trends could be in a topping phase, which is constructive in terms of market’s belief that the Fed is keen to take a more conservative path with future rate hikes.
- ECB Main Refinancing Rate inline at 0.00%. On Thursday, Mario Draghi joined most of the world’s other big central bankers in halting crisis-era stimulus programmes, announcing that the ECB would call time on its own €2.6tn bond-buying scheme. Though the ECB remains poised to react again quickly if growth goes into a sustained period of weakness and wage and consumer price inflation start to head downwards again. The central bank gave itself the flexibility by announcing it would reinvest fully bonds that come due to maintain the stock.
- In Brexit, May continues to face a monumental task of trying to pass her deal through Parliament, but with the vote now delayed until mid-January she has time to wring further concessions from EU. The whole Brexit deal now rests on the Irish backstop issue which essentially comes down to whether Northern Ireland will fall under EU rules in perpetuity or whether UK will be able to assert control over the territory sometime in the future. For the time being markets continue to bet that cooler heads will prevail and that the UK will remain within the customs union in 2019, but the chaos and turmoil of British politics have undermined investor confidence and traders remain wary.
STOCK MARKET WRAP
- U.S. major indices finished mixed on Thursday, as ongoing uncertainty surrounding global issues kept many buyers on the sidelines.
- Procter & Gamble (PG 96.49, +2.46, +2.6%) was a standout in the consumer staples sector, and Dow, after being upgraded to ‘Buy’ from ‘Neutral’ at Bank of America/Merrill Lynch. Retail stocks were one of the hardest hit groups on Thursday, which helped drive the weakness in the consumer discretionary (-0.4%) sector. The SPDR S&P Retail ETF (XRT 42.52, -1.17) lost -2.7%. On a related note, Tailored Brands (TLRD 14.13, -6.01) and Oxford Industries (OXM 67.24, -7.57) dropped -29.8% and -10.1%, respectively, after some disappointing guidance/outlook.
PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) has partnered with mining and blockchain software company Bitfury Group to create a blockchain accelerator for businesses in Russia. The consulting firm hasalready used Exonum — Bitfury’s open source framework for building blockchain applications for educational courses and seminars. The main goal of the new accelerator is to meet the “current needs” of the consulting giant’s enterprise clients in Russia. The company also believes that blockchain can “drastically” change the modern economy and cut personnel and infrastructure costs with the automation of business processes. With a revenue totalling over $41 billion for the 2018 fiscal year, PwC is currently the second largest among the Big Four professional services firms.
Hyperledger has onboarded 12 new members, including such major firms as Alibaba Cloud, Citi, and Deutsche Telekom. Launched in 2016, Hyperledger is an open source project created by the Linux Foundation and created to support the development of blockchain-based distributed ledgers. The latest general members that joined the initiative include Alibaba Cloud, a subsidiary of the e-commerce giant; financial services firm Citigroup, Deutsche Telekom, one of the largest telecoms providers in Europe; and European blockchain trading platform we.trade, among others. This month, the Hyperledger Technical Steering Committee approved the Ursa project, a modular cryptography software library. Ursa is meant to avoid wasted work on duplicate projects, enhancing security by simplifying analysis and making it “less likely for less experienced people to create their own less secure implementations.”
Opera Releases ‘Web 3-Ready’ Android Browser With Ethereum, DApp Support
Opera has launched its “Web 3-ready” browser for Android, with crypto wallet integration, support for Ethereum (ETH) and interactions with decentralized applications (DApps). Hamel explained Opera’s choice to support Ethereum and the Ethereum Web3 API as being based on the perception that the protocol “has the largest community of developers building Dapps” and significant “momentum behind it.” “Web 3.0” is a term that was initially coined to refer to the ambition for the development of a semantic internet, and is used to refer to the evolution of a more intelligent, open and distributed internet, which could involve the use of blockchain, decentralized computing and cryptocurrencies. Opera first announced it would be integrating a built-in crypto wallet for its desktop browser in early August, after launching a mobile crypto wallet as part of its beta Opera for Android in July. In September, the firm released an interoperable “Labs” beta version for Android with integrated wallet, Web 3.0 and DApp functionality.