Author: Consultant

  • Calendar: Nov 28 – Dec 2

    Calendar: Nov 28 – Dec 2

    Monday, November 28

    (830 am ET) Canada current account balance

    Earnings include: Pinduoduo Inc.

    ==

    Tuesday, November 29

    Japan jobless rate and retail sales for October

    Euro area economic and consumer confidence indexes

    (830 am ET) Canada real GDP for the third quarter. BMO expects an annualized growth rate of 1.5%, with a flat reading for September.

    (9 am ET) U.S. S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller 20-city Home Price Index for September. Consensus is for a 1.2% drop from August, but with prices up 10.7% year over year. Also FHFA House Price Index to be released.

    (10 am ET) U.S. Conference Board consumer confidence index for November. Consensus is for the index to fall to 100 from October’s 102.5.

    Earnings include: Bank of Nova Scotia; Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co.; Intuit Inc.; Shaw Communications Inc.; Workday Inc.

    ==

    Wednesday, November 30

    China PMIs and industrial production

    Euro area CPI for November, plus German unemployment data and the latest GDP readings from France and Italy.

    (815 am ET) U.S. ADP National Employment Report for November.

    (830 am ET) U.S. real GDP for the third quarter. Consensus is for annualized growth of 2.7%.

    (830 am ET) U.S. goods trade deficit for October.

    (830 am ET) U.S. wholesale and retail inventories.

    (945 am ET) Chicago PMI

    (10 am ET) U.S. pending home sales for October. Consensus is for a 5.2% decline.

    (10 am ET) U.S. job openings and labor turnover survey.

    (130 pm ET) Fed Chair Powell speaks in Washington on the economic outlook

    (2pm ET) U.S. Fed Beige Book

    Earnings include: BRP Inc.; National Bank of Canada; Royal Bank of Canada; Salesforce Inc.

    ==

    Thursday, December 1

    China Caixin manufacturing PMI for November. Japan capital spending, manufacturing PMI and consumer confidence data.

    Euro area jobless rate for October, plus German retail sales. UK manufacturing PMI for November and nationwide house prices.

    (830 am ET) Canada labour productivity for the third quarter.

    (930 am ET) S&P global manufacturing PMI for Canada for November.

    (830 am ET) U.S. initial jobless claims.

    (830 am ET) U.S. personal spending and personal income for October. Consensus is for rise of 0.8% and 0.4%, respectively.

    (830 am ET) U.S. core PCE price index for October. Consensus is for a rise of 0.3% on a monthly basis, or 5% from a year earlier.

    (945 am ET) U.S. S&P global manufacturing PMI for November.

    (10 am ET) U.S. construction spending for October. Consensus is for a drop of 0.2%.

    North American auto sales

    Earnings include: Bank of Montreal; Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce; Dollar General Corp.; Toronto-Dominion Bank

    ==

    Friday, December 2

    Euro area producer price index, Germany trade surplus and France industrial production data.

    (830 am ET) Canada employment for November. BMO expects net job gains of 10,000 – well below the gains of 108,300 in October. It expects the unemployment rate to rise to 5.3% from 5.2%. Consensus is for average hourly wages to be up 5.4% from a year earlier, slightly below October’s 5.6% gain.

    (830 am ET) U.S. nonfarm payrolls for November. Consensus is for net job gains of 200,000, below October’s gains of 261,000, with the unemployment rate holding steady at 3.7%. Average hourly earnings are forecast to be up 4.6% from a year ago.

    Earnings include: Canadian Western Bank; Marvell Technology Group Ltd.

    Sunday, December 5

    OPEC+ meeting

  • Beijing grinds to a near halt as China’s capital city battles Covid with more lockdowns

    Beijing grinds to a near halt as China’s capital city battles Covid with more lockdowns

    • More and more apartment compounds in Beijing on Friday forbade residents from leaving for at least a few days.
    • “You constantly hear of someone going into lockdown and you have this constant feeling that you’re going to be next,” Joerg Wuttke, president of the EU Chamber of Commerce in China, said Friday.
    • It was not clear how many people were affected at a city level, and to what degree stay-in-place measures were being enforced.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/25/chinas-capital-city-beijing-battles-covid-with-more-apartment-lockdowns.html

  • Oil falls as supply-disruption fears ease amid Russian price cap talks

    Oil falls as supply-disruption fears ease amid Russian price cap talks

    PUBLISHED THU, NOV 24 202212:05 AM EST

    • Oil prices fell on Thursday, extending losses from the previous session, as fears of supply disruption eased on news that the Group of Seven (G7) nations were considering a high price cap on Russian oil.
    • A greater-than-expected build-up in U.S. gasoline inventories added to downward pressure.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/24/oil-falls-as-supply-disruption-fears-ease-amid-russian-price-cap-talks.html

  • Apple and Elon Musk’s Twitter are on a collision course

    Apple and Elon Musk’s Twitter are on a collision course

    • Musk wants to vastly increase the amount of money the company makes through subscriptions while opening up the site to more “free speech.”
    • This creates a risk that Twitter could violate Apple or Google’s app rules in a way that slows down the company or even gets its software booted from app stores.
    • Battle lines are being drawn. Last week, Musk complained about app store fees, which are between 15% and 30% of digital sales, in a tweet.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/23/apple-and-elon-musks-twitter-are-on-a-collision-course.html

  • China may have ‘passed the point of no return’ as Covid infections soar

    China may have ‘passed the point of no return’ as Covid infections soar

    • In the last few days, the mainland China daily Covid case count has climbed to around or more than 28,000 — near levels seen in April during a stringent lockdown in Shanghai, according to CNBC calculations of Wind Information data.
    • “China might have already passed the point of no return, as it’s unlikely to achieve zero Covid again without another Shanghai-style hard lockdown,” Macquarie’s Chief China Economist Larry Hu said in a report Tuesday.
    • In GDP terms, nearly 20% of China’s economy was negatively affected by Covid controls as of Monday, close to the high of 21.2% recorded in mid-April during Shanghai’s lockdown, Nomura’s Chief China Economist Ting Lu said, citing the firm’s model.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/23/china-may-have-passed-the-point-of-no-return-as-covid-infections-soar.html

  • Nov 14 Email – Track Stocks

    NOV 14 Email – Track Over Sold Stocks

    QED
  • ‘Deeply marred’: COP27 reaches deal for rich countries to pay for developing world’s climate disasters, but little else

    ‘Deeply marred’: COP27 reaches deal for rich countries to pay for developing world’s climate disasters, but little else

    The United Nations climate conference in Egypt limped over the finish line Sunday morning with a commitment to launch a fund to compensate poor countries suffering from catastrophic climate-change events. The last-minute breakthrough spared the COP27 event from total collapse.

    Agreeing to put together a “loss and damage” fund stood out because few other commitments related to the fight against climate change made it into the final statement, which was published a day and a half after COP27, held in the seaside resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, was supposed to close.

    The countries made no fresh pledges to ramp up their carbon-reduction plans, nor did the statement call for the phasing down and eventual elimination of all fossil fuels. The upshot is that COP27 failed to build on the pledges made a year ago at COP26 in Glasgow to eliminate coal, triggering criticisms from environmental groups that oil and gas had, in effect, been given a new lease on life.

    “COP27′s key steps toward a loss and damage fund are deeply marred by the lack of progress on fossil fuels,” said Collin Rees, the U.S. campaign manager of Oil Change International, an environmental group pushing for the end of fossil fuels. “Despite unprecedented discussion of equitably phasing out oil, gas and coal, the end result was yet another COP without formal recognition that Big Oil is driving the climate crisis.”

    Ruth Townend,research fellow on the environment at the British think tank Chatham House, said COP27 squandered the opportunity to commit to intensified decarbonization efforts.

    “World governments have, at most, three years to bend the curve on emissions, and nothing short of transformational change to energy, transport and food systems, the global financial architecture and the way individuals live their lives, can achieve this,” she said.

    Developing countries and environmental groups fear that the goal of limiting average global temperature increases to 1.5C over preindustrial levels – made at the Paris Agreement in 2015 – will be harder, even impossible, to achieve since new oil and gas projects were not condemned in COP27′s final statement.

    They noted that more than 600 oil and gas representatives and lobbyists attended COP27, where they pushed to keep their fossil-fuel development agenda alive as the West’s efforts to wean itself off Russian oil and gas sends energy prices soaring.

    “The loss and damage deal is a positive step but risking becoming a fund for the end of the world if countries don’t move faster to slash emissions and limit warming to below 1.5C,” said Manuel Pulgar-Vidal of the WWF, a former environment minister of Peru who was the president of COP20 in Lima.

    Still, the breakthrough on the loss and damage fund constitutes a big win for poor countries on the front lines of radical climate change.

    The logjam was broken on Saturday, when the United States said it would not block such a fund. For decades, the U.S. has resisted the idea for fear of being on the hook for endless liability claims from hard-hit countries. The American move took place two days after the European Union, fearing a COP27 collapse, said it would support the fund. But it was the relentless Pakistan negotiating team that kept the developing countries united.

    Loss and damage refers to payments required for reconstruction after climate-related disasters, such as the floods that inundated a third of Pakistan last summer. It is separate from climate-change mitigation and adaptation financing, which was launched at the Paris conference in 2015 and is supposed to pay out US$100-billion a year to vulnerable countries, but has always come up short.

    Details of the loss and damage fund had yet to be worked out. A UN committee is to work on its technical design and funding mechanisms, all of which would have to be approved at the COP28 conference in Dubai this time next year.

    Pushing for the creation of the fund became the developing countries’ crusade during the two weeks of fraught talks at COP27, whose outright failure appeared to go from possible to likely in the chaotic, frustrating final days. Near the end of the summit, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres made an emergency visit to plea for progress.

    The key sticking point was determining which wealthy, or near-wealthy countries would pay for damages in which countries. The United States and the EU want China, the world’s biggest polluter, but not its biggest historical polluter, to contribute to the fund, all the more so since it has moved up the wealth curve quickly to become a manufacturing and technological superpower.

    But China still considers itself a developing country, as do the World Trade Organization and the UN, which has not updated its definition of developing countries since the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change was signed in 1992.

    At COP27, the head of the Chinese delegation, Xie Zhenhua, insisted that China had no obligation to provide financial assistance to poor countries. He said a “loss and damage fund, if there is any fund, the responsibility to provide funds lies with developed countries. It is their responsibility and obligation.”

    He did not rule out making payments to hard-hit countries. “Developing countries can contribute on a voluntary basis,” he said.

    Canada has supported the fund. African environmental groups and delegates praised the fund’s backing from developed countries but warned that going from concept to reality still faced potentially years of work and many hurdles.

    “COP27 has done what no other COP has achieved and created a loss and damage fund to support the most impacted communities on climate change,” said Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa. “It is worth noting that we have the fund but we need the money to make it worthwhile. What we have is an empty bucket.”

    There is no money in the fund and some developing countries fear that the wealthy countries who agreed to push the idea forward will bring it alive by diverting money from existing financial mechanisms, such as the US$100-billion adaptation and mitigation fund.

  • Five countries, other than China, most dependent on the South China Sea

    • An estimated $3.37 trillion worth, or 21% of all global trade, transited through the South China Sea in 2016, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development.
    • Territorially, there are seven claimants to the South China Sea: China, Brunei, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Taiwan and Vietnam. But to whom does the South China Sea matter most?
    • Analysts name the top five countries, other than China, that are most dependent on the South China Sea: Vietnam, Singapore, Indonesia, Japan and South Korea.

    https://www.cnbc.com/2022/11/18/five-countries-other-than-china-most-dependent-on-the-south-china-sea.html