Markets Overview

  • ASX SPI 200 futures up 0.3% to 7,248.00
  • Dow Average down 0.3% to 35,258.55
  • Aussie up 0.6% to 0.7225 per US$
  • U.S. 10-year yield fell 5.1bps to 1.8235%
  • Australia 3-year bond yield rose 4bps to 1.35%
  • Australia 10-year bond yield rose 5bps to 2.00%
  • Gold spot up 1.6% to $1,843.18
  • Brent futures up 0.7% to $88.13/bbl

Economic Events

  • 10:30am: (AU) Australia to Sell A$1 Billion 182-Day Bills
  • 11am: (AU) Jan. Consumer Inflation Expectation, prior 4.8%
  • 11:30am: (AU) Dec. Full Time Employment Change, prior 128,300
  • 11:30am: (AU) Dec. Part Time Employment Change, prior 237,800
  • 11:30am: (AU) Dec. Participation Rate, est. 66.2%, prior 66.1%
  • 11:30am: (AU) Dec. Employment Change, est. 60,000, prior 366,100
  • 11:30am: (AU) Dec. Unemployment Rate, est. 4.5%, prior 4.6%
  • 11:30am: (AU) Dec. RBA FX Transactions Market, prior A$866m
  • 11:30am: (AU) Dec. RBA FX Transactions Government, prior -A$896m
  • 11:30am: (AU) Dec. RBA FX Transactions Other, prior A$1.17b

Other News

Italy’s top court has added a new human rights violation to a list commonly thought to include enslavement, torture and forced starvation: the sound of a toilet flushing at night.

That country’s supreme court cited rulings by the European Court of Human Rights to conclude a 19-year legal battle that began when a couple living in a flat near La Spezia complained that their neighbors’ new toilet was keeping them awake with “intolerable noises,” according to the Milan-based newspaper Il Giornale.

A lower court ruled against them, and the couple elevated the case to an appeals court in the northern city of Genoa. That court ordered an investigation that revealed why the toilet seemed so loud: The four brothers who owned that apartment had embedded the water tank in a 9-inch wall not far from the couple’s headboard, the Times of London reported.

The court was sympathetic to the couple’s struggle to sleep. The sound of flushing — “aggravated by frequent night use” — compromised their quality of life and violated the right to the free exercise of daily habits established by the European Convention on Human Rights, the appellate judge said, according to Il Giornale.

For this breach, the brothers would have to move the water tank and pay the couple about $565 for every year since the device was installed — roughly $10,760 in total — the court ruled.

The brothers asked Italy’s supreme court to intervene, and that court also ruled against them. The European Court of Human Rights had upheld the “right to respect for one’s private and family life,” the high court said, according to Il Giornale. The judge added that the nighttime flushing’s interference with rest also violated the Italian constitution’s right to health, the Times reported.

The extended neighborly dispute is not unusual for the country’s famously slow justice system. Italy has the European Union’s least efficient judicial process, with courts taking an average of more than 500 days to reach a first conclusion in civil and commercial cases, the European Commission concluded in July. First appeals typically take almost 800 days, and appeals to the supreme court stretch for about 1,300 days.

Prime Minister Mario Draghi has vowed to change the system, incentivized by a desire to bolster the country’s economy and unlock coronavirus recovery funds from the European Union. Speaking to U.S. businesspeople in November, Italian Minister of Justice Marta Cartabia described the administration’s attempted changes as “the mother of all reforms.”

The toilet case exemplifies the type of problem that the government needs to fix, journalist Massimiliano Parente argued in Il Giornale on Monday. Albert Einstein, he wrote, developed the theory of relativity in less time than it took for Italy’s courts to solve a tiff between neighbors.