Bitcoin’s wild price swings keep investors on edge. Mile-high drama as Belarus forces airliner to land. Cannibal mice are threatening Sydney. Here's what you need to know to start your day.
Bitcoin’s extreme volatility continued to whipsaw investors with double-digit percentage moves. Bitcoin traded down as much as 18% at one point Sunday. Other cryptocurrencies, including Ethereum and Dogecoin, also slumped, according to CoinGecko.com. Earlier in the weekend, Bitcoin had climbed more than 8% following a tweet from Elon Musk that he would back crypto in the battle against fiat currencies. Meanwhile, former U.S. Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers said cryptocurrencies could stay a feature of global markets as something akin to “digital gold,” even if their importance in economies will remain limited.
Stocks in Asia are set to start the week mixed amid volatile trading in high-risk assets such as Bitcoin and ongoing concerns about the outlook for inflation. Currencies were steady in early trading. On Friday, the S&P 500 closed little changed after erasing earlier gains, while the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 finished lower. Futures edged higher in Japan and were modestly lower in Australia and Hong Kong. U.S. futures opened little changed and oil edged higher.
Europe reacted with outrage after Belarus ordered a Ryanair flight transiting its airspace to land and arrested a journalist on board, an unprecedented violation of European air travel protocols that immediately prompted the threat of further sanctions on Minsk. The Boeing 737-800, carrying passengers from Athens to Vilnius, was diverted to the Belarusian capital under the escort of a Mig-29 fighter jet. Authorities arrested a journalist who covered protests against President Alexander Lukashenko, whose election to a sixth term last year was internationally disputed.
Taiwan reported a steady increase in Covid-19 cases over the weekend, as the government’s decision to revise up past daily totals dented confidence in official data at a time when soft lockdown measures appear to be slowing the rate of new infections. And the world’s supply of chips depends on Taiwan getting vaccines. On the other side of the world, the spread of coronavirus in the U.S. continues to slow.
The plague of mice attacking parts of Australia is turning into a horror story, with the rodents threatening to invade Sydney, reports of the vermin eating their own, and the farming industry being thrown into turmoil. Millions of mice have swarmed schools, homes and hospitals in the eastern states of New South Wales and Queensland, wreaking havoc and leaving entire towns suffocating from a lingering pungent odor. The swarm is also threatening Australia’s $51 billion agriculture industry. Mice numbers have exploded after a bumper crop last season.
What We’ve Been Reading
This is what’s caught our eye over the past 24 hours:
And finally, here's what Cormac's interested in today
They weren't invited for the Olympics and now foreigners seem to be turning their backs on Japan's stock market. Overseas investors sold $10.2 billion worth of Japanese equities and futures in the week ended May 14, according to the latest exchange data. As my colleague Kurt Schussler pointed out Friday, that's the most since March 2020 amid the height of the pandemic selloff. Concerns about higher inflation hit global stocks in the week of the outflows, pushing Japanese shares to the brink of a technical correction. But worries about a lack of inflation in Japan must also be weighing on investors' minds, especially toward shares most exposed to the domestic economy. Japan’s key inflation indicator showed prices falling for a ninth straight month in April in stark contrast with global peers.
The country is suffering from a slow vaccine rollout which is holding back the domestic recovery and capping demand-driven inflationary pressure. A historic unwillingness to raise prices also leaves Japan's companies open to margin pressure if external inflation increases their costs of production. The inflation imbalance could well weigh on the yen which should give stocks some support. But it's hard to make a bull case for Japanese shares when the country is lagging its developed peers on so many fronts.
Cormac Mullen is a cross-asset reporter and editor for Bloomberg News in Tokyo.
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May 24, 2021 at 06:17AM
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Five Things You Need to Know to Start Your Day - Bloomberg
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