Markets Overview
- ASX SPI 200 futures down 0.3% to 7,423.00
- Dow Average down 0.2% to 34,751.32
- Aussie down 0.5% to 0.7296 per US$
- U.S. 10-year yield rose 3.5bps to 1.3344%
- Australia 3-year bond yield rose 3bps to 0.23%
- Australia 10-year bond yield rose 6bps to 1.26%
- Gold spot down 2.3% to $1,753.40
- Brent futures up 0.3% to $75.66/bbl
Economic Events
- 11am: (AU) Australia to Sell A$1.5 Billion 4.5% 2033 Bonds
Asian stocks looked set for a steady open Friday as traders weighed risks from China to the global recovery. Treasury yields and the dollar rose following surprise strength in U.S. retail sales.
Futures edged up in Japan and Hong Kong but dipped in Australia, while U.S. contracts slipped in early Asian trading. U.S. stocks closed mostly lower after swinging between gains and losses ahead of Friday’s quarterly expiration of options and futures, which can trigger volatility.
U.S. retail sales rose unexpectedly in August, easing some of the worries over the impact of the delta variant and highlighting the case for the Federal Reserve to begin paring stimulus. Jobless claims increased, likely reflecting volatility in weekly data as the labor market broadly recovers.
Other News
The former director of a secretive U.S. government UFO program is ready to tell his full story.
Luis Elizondo, who in 2010 headed the Pentagon’s Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program’s effort to study UFOs around the world, has signed a book deal with William Morrow, an imprint of HarperCollins. The memoir “promises to reveal shocking never-before-shared details regarding what Elizondo has learned about UFOs and the profound implications for humanity, all of which will escalate what is already a hot-topic globally.”
In May, Elizondo was featured on CBS’s 60 Minutes segment on the UFO phenomena which has racked up 10 million views on YouTube, making it the show’s fourth most-watched segment on the streaming service.
Former president Barack Obama added on The Late Late Show in May, “What is true, and I’m actually being serious here, is that there are, there’s footage and records of objects in the skies, that we don’t know exactly what they are. We can’t explain how they moved, their trajectory. They did not have an easily explainable pattern. And so, you know, I think that people still take seriously trying to investigate and figure out what that is.”
In June, the Pentagon released a long-awaited report on UFOs (which have been re-dubbed Unidentified Aerial Phenomena – UAPs) that contained limited information about the task force’s findings. The report focused on 143 sightings by military aviators made since 2004 of objects that seemed to defy traditional classification, and some of which seemed to break the laws of physics as well. The report offered five possible conclusions about what objects could be that ranged from the ultra mundane (birds, plastic bags), to the rather worrisome (top secret technology from U.S. adversaries like Russia and China), to the rather eyebrow raising (“Other”). Most significantly to UFO buffs, the report did not rule out aliens and concluded more study was needed.
