Regional heavyweights China, Japan and South Korea are all on holiday today, a turn of affairs that leaves the rest of Asia content to follow Wall Street on a quiet news day. Big tech rallied late in US session, lifting Wall Street equity indexes to a positive close after a mostly negative day.
Big techs performance should not overshadow the negative issues that hung over markets for most of yesterday. European PMI’s followed Asia’s and posted nightmarish falls. Hong Kong GDP shrunk by nearly 9.0% on a YoY basis. That mostly confirmed the damage wrecked by the COVID-19 pandemic shutdown if anyone had somehow missed the 25 million American job losses over the past month.
That is undoubtedly being balanced out by the wave of partial re-openings of economies around the world. From New Zealand and Australia to Germany and much of Europe, including the Spain and Italy epicenters, countries are quietly emerging from COVID-19 lockdowns. Indeed, that is a story that oil markets have…
