Market Update

European stocks closed Wednesday on big gains, supported by positive sentiments after it was reported that new progress has been made on the way to develop a vaccine for the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). The pan-European Stoxx 600 index rose by 1.76% and settled at 373.87. FTSE100 surged by 1.83% and …

The US Federal Reserve does not measure market functioning based on the level of the Treasury bond yields, said Lorie Logan, executive vice president in the Markets Group of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Logan, who also serves as the manager of the System Open Market Account (SOMA) …

President of the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia, Patrick Harker, said in a TV interview with Bloomberg that the Fed should maintain interest rates until the inflation target is achieved. “We’ve been saying for a long time that the 2% inflation goal is symmetric, which means we should overshoot it. …

The Bank of Canada (BoC) plans to maintain its main interest rate near zero until the 2% inflation target is sustainably achieved. This comes as the BoC decided to maintain its benchmark interest rate at 0.25% on Wednesday BoC is also committed to buying $3.7 billion worth of Canadian government …

Factory sales in Canada increased by a record 10.7% during May, after falling in April by 27.9%, according to data by Statistics Canada on Wednesday. Manufacturing sales were 28.4% below their level in February, before the COVID-19 crisis emerged. A majority of market analysts believe that it would take at …

Data released by the Federal Reserve on Wednesday showed industrial production in the U.S. increased 5.4% in June after expanding 1.4% in May. This reading was better than market expectations of 4.3%. Other details of the report revealed that manufacturing output rose 7.2% in June and capacity utilization improved to …

OPEC+ (OPEC and allies) is holding a Joint Ministerial Monitoring Committee (JMMC) meeting on Wednesday to decide oil output policy from August. The meeting will focus on easing output cuts to 7.7M bpd until December. This comes amid the slow recovery in the global economy that was hit by the …

France said on Wednesday that they believe an EU deal on the European recovery plan can be reached by the end of this week. And according to Reuters, France presidency office also said that France could obtain a European subsidy of nearly 40 B euros (45.76 B dollars) to help …

China said on Wednesday that British Prime Minister Ban Huawei’s participation in the fifth-generation network is frustrating, and that other Chinese companies have followed headlines of how UK treat the telecommunications giant, which is harmful to investment. Liu Xiaoming, China’s Ambassador to the UK, said ‘the way you treat Huawei …

US President Donald Trump has signed an order to end preferential economic treatment for Hong Kong, after China enacted a new security law there. Hong Kong would be treated “the same as mainland China”, Trump said. He also signed a law to impose sanctions on officials who cracked down on …