Aug 11 (Reuters) - U.S. stock index futures crawled higher on Thursday, adding to strong gains from the previous session on first signs of cooling inflation, with investors looking for more evidence from data on producer prices and the labor market.
Following a softer-than-expected rise in consumer prices on Wednesday, investors slashed their bets of another super-sized interest-rate hike, driving the main indexes sharply higher.
The gains came even as Federal Reserve policymakers left no doubt they will continue to tighten monetary policy until price pressures are fully broken. read more
- producer-price index, which generally reflects supply conditions in the economy, increased by 9.8% on a 12-month basis in July, the Labor Department said Thursday. That compared with a 11.3% increase in June.
- Heathrow airport Chief Executive Officer John Holland-Kaye defended a flight cap that’s truncated airline schedules and upset travel plans for thousands of Britons, saying the move has greatly reduced delays.
The limit of 100,000 daily departing passengers has delivered improvements to the customer experience, with fewer last-minute cancellations and better aircraft punctuality and baggage delivery, Holland-Kaye said in a statement Thursday.
A key measure of US producer prices unexpectedly fell in July for the first time in more than two years, largely reflecting a drop in energy costs and representing a welcome moderation in inflationary pressures.
The producer price index for final demand decreased 0.5% from a month earlier and rose 9.8% from a year ago, Labor Department data showed Thursday. The pullback was due to a decline in the costs of goods, though services prices only edged up.
- post Covid-19 condition were roughly half those found in healthy, uninfected people or individuals who fully recovered from the pandemic disease, researchers at Yale School of Medicine in Connecticut and the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York found.
- Volvo AB is proving that Europe’s sleepy market for new corporate-bond issues is still open -- as long as the returns are high enough to lure investors in.
Volvo Treasury AB, the financing arm of the vehicle maker and one of Sweden’s biggest corporate-bond issuers, pulled in more than 3 billion euros ($3 billion) of bids for a 500 million-euro
- Allison Schrager is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering economics. A senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, she is author of “An Economist Walks Into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk.” @AllisonSchrager
An unexpected decline in Swedish long-term inflation expectations could ease pressure on the country’s central bank to accelerate interest rate increases next month.
Money market players in the Nordic nation now see price increases according to the
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Explosions at a Russian airbase in Crimea that Ukraine says destroyed nine fighter aircraft may indicate new Ukrainian offensive capabilities that complicate Kremlin efforts to support its invading forces, according to European intelligence officials and defense analysts.
“In just one day, the occupiers lost 10 combat aircraft, nine in Crimea and one more in the direction of Zaporizhzhia,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy said in his nightly video address to the nation. More Russian armored vehicles, ammunition warehouses and logistics routes were also destroyed, and “the more losses the occupiers suffer, the sooner we will be able to liberate our land,” he said.
MILAN, Aug 11 (Reuters Breakingviews) - Italy’s likely next government has some big spending plans. A coalition of rightist parties looks poised to win general elections in September, making Giorgia Meloni of the nationalist Brothers of Italy party prime minister. High public debt and European Union vigilance will puncture the group’s wildest trial balloons.
The abrupt fall of Mario Draghi’s executive last month paves the way for yet another Italian government. An alliance including Brothers of Italy, the anti-immigration League and ex-premier Silvio Berlusconi’s Forza Italia would command 49% of votes, opinion polls show, well ahead of its divided political rivals. Meloni’s party, which has roots in post-war neo-fascism, opposed Draghi’s agenda and has a eurosceptic past, may capture 24% of the vote.
High on the alliance’s agenda is slashing taxes to boost consumer demand. While the group has yet to publish an official manifesto, its plans include extending a flat...
WASHINGTON, Aug 10 (Reuters) - China's war games around Taiwan have led Biden administration officials to recalibrate their thinking on whether to scrap some tariffs or potentially impose others on Beijing, setting those options aside for now, according to sources familiar with the deliberations.
President Joe Biden's team has been wrestling for months with various ways to ease the costs of duties imposed on Chinese imports during predecessor Donald Trump's tenure, as it tries to tamp down skyrocketing inflation.
It has considered a combination of eliminating some tariffs, launching a new "Section 301" investigation into potential areas for additional tariffs, and expanding a list of tariff exclusions to aid U.S. companies that can only get certain supplies from China.
Higher gas prices, including in the summer when demand is supposed to be at its lowest, are a long-term trend argued asset manager Investec.
In its latest report on oil and gas prices, Investec described historically elevated gas markets – which peaked at £8 per therm in March and have averaged 230p for the year -as a “long term trend” which could persist beyond 2025.
Investec said: “We anticipate that if Russia continues to restrict gas supply then UK gas prices are likely to remain elevated. This is underlined by our forward curve, which remains elevated beyond 2025.”
The asset manager noted that the UK gas prices began to move higher last year.
Last summer prices were 50 per cent above the 10-year average – before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine – driven upwards by rebounding demand and underperformance of renewables.
- Gold attracts some dip-buying and climbs to $1,800 neighbourhood amid sustained USD selling. Diminishing odds for a larger Fed rate hike, sliding US bond yields continue to weigh on the USD. The risk-on impulse seems to be the only factor capping the upside for the safe-haven commodity.
XAU/USD is keeping the corrective momentum intact, as it remains below the $1,800 mark. In the view of strategists at TD Securities, gold’s price action may be revealing substantial selling interest.
- producer-price index, which generally reflects supply conditions in the economy, increased by 9.8% on a 12-month basis in July, the Labor Department said Thursday. That compared with a 11.3% increase in June.
Aug 11 (Reuters) - Verizon Communications Inc's (VZ.N) internet services appeared to be back up for most users after facing a brief disruption on Thursday, which the company said was due to a fiber cut during an overnight construction activity.
"Our engineers are aware of this issue and are onsite working with our vendor partners and local crews to resolve this issue quickly," a Verizon spokesperson said.
At the peak of the outage, more than 2,000 user reports cited issues with Verizon, according to outage tracking website Downdetector.com, which collates status reports from a number of sources.
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