After weeks of high volatility, Wall Street may find next week’s quiet macroeconomic calendar the perfect opportunity to regroup and plan for the final stretch of the dangerous year.
With no major announcements scheduled, “investors may have an opportunity to ... assess the damage that has been done through the last several weeks,” said Gina Martin, an analyst at Wachovia Securities.
For now, “a lot of investors are sitting on the sidelines and waiting to see how the market trades until the end of the year,” she said.
After a spectacular 18 percent rise over six sessions, Wall Street was hammered last week — once again in volatile trade — as the brutal reality of the rapidly accelerating financial crisis sank in.
The economic downturn rapidly overshadowed the euphoria over the election of Democratic Senator Barack Obama late on Tuesday as the 44th president of the US.
The “Obama effect” lasted only one day, as voters headed to the polls, lifting the markets in the biggest election day rally in history.
Unemployment worries drove the blue-chip Dow Jones Industrial Average down nearly 1,000 points in the next two days.
On Wednesday the ADP survey showed the private sector shed 157,000 jobs last month, far more than already pessimistic analysts had expected, and on Thursday investors braced for a grim October jobs report due from the US government on Friday.
Their fears were more than proved right. The US unemployment rate for last month rose to its highest level since 1994, official data showed on Friday, with analysts forecasting it to move even higher in Obama’s first year as president.
The US Labor Department said the jobless rate rose to 6.5 percent as the world’s largest economy shed 240,000 jobs during the month amid the credit squeeze and downturn.
For the first week of this month, the Dow fell 4 percent to 8,943.81 points, after gaining more than 11 percent in the previous week.
The NASDAQ dropped 4.27 percent to 1,647.40 and the broad Standard & Poor’s 500 ended 3.92 percent lower at 930.75.
The bond market renewed its safe-haven status. The yield on the 10-year Treasury bond fell to 3.780 percent from 3.970 percent last Friday and the 30-year Treasury bond slid to 4.261 percent from 4.369 percent.
In the week ahead, only the retail sales numbers on Friday were seen as having market-moving potential, analysts said, because of concerns that consumers’ growing unwillingness to spend will spell disaster for the all-important holiday shopping season.
DISCONTENT: The CCP finds positive content about the lives of the Chinese living in Taiwan threatening, as such video could upset people in China, an expert said Chinese spouses of Taiwanese who make videos about their lives in Taiwan have been facing online threats from people in China, a source said yesterday. Some young Chinese spouses of Taiwanese make videos about their lives in Taiwan, often speaking favorably about their living conditions in the nation compared with those in China, the source said. However, the videos have caught the attention of Chinese officials, causing the spouses to come under attack by Beijing’s cyberarmy, they said. “People have been messing with the YouTube channels of these Chinese spouses and have been harassing their family members back in China,”
The Central Weather Administration (CWA) yesterday said there are four weather systems in the western Pacific, with one likely to strengthen into a tropical storm and pose a threat to Taiwan. The nascent tropical storm would be named Usagi and would be the fourth storm in the western Pacific at the moment, along with Typhoon Yinxing and tropical storms Toraji and Manyi, the CWA said. It would be the first time that four tropical cyclones exist simultaneously in November, it added. Records from the meteorology agency showed that three tropical cyclones existed concurrently in January in 1968, 1991 and 1992.
GEOPOLITICAL CONCERNS: Foreign companies such as Nissan, Volkswagen and Konica Minolta have pulled back their operations in China this year Foreign companies pulled more money from China last quarter, a sign that some investors are still pessimistic even as Beijing rolls out stimulus measures aimed at stabilizing growth. China’s direct investment liabilities in its balance of payments dropped US$8.1 billion in the third quarter, data released by the Chinese State Administration of Foreign Exchange showed on Friday. The gauge, which measures foreign direct investment (FDI) in China, was down almost US$13 billion for the first nine months of the year. Foreign investment into China has slumped in the past three years after hitting a record in 2021, a casualty of geopolitical tensions,
‘SOMETHING SPECIAL’: Donald Trump vowed to reward his supporters, while President William Lai said he was confident the Taiwan-US partnership would continue Donald Trump was elected the 47th president of the US early yesterday morning, an extraordinary comeback for a former president who was convicted of felony charges and survived two assassination attempts. With a win in Wisconsin, Trump cleared the 270 electoral votes needed to clinch the presidency. As of press time last night, The Associated Press had Trump on 277 electoral college votes to 224 for US Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic Party’s nominee, with Alaska, Arizona, Maine, Michigan and Nevada yet to finalize results. He had 71,289,216 votes nationwide, or 51 percent, while Harris had 66,360,324 (47.5 percent). “We’ve been through so
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