Markets Overview

  • ASX SPI 200 futures little changed at 7,051.00
  • Dow Average down 0.8% to 31,253.13
  • Aussie up 1.3% to 0.7047 per US$
  • U.S. 10-year yield fell 4.5bps to 2.8388%
  • Australia 3-year bond yield fell 5bps to 2.85%
  • Australia 10-year bond yield fell 8bps to 3.38%
  • Gold spot up 1.4% to $1,842.17
  • Brent futures up 2.2% to $111.55/bbl

Economic Events

  • 11am: (AU) Australia to Sell A$700 Million 4.75% 2027 Bonds
  • Australian banks’ may be more likely to hit their more than A$215 billion of green lending targets after the May 21 federal election under most outcomes. The Coalition’s claimed A$22 billion green investment target could rise by A$25 billion if Labor wins, or toward A$100 billion if the Greens gain the balance of power, as they did in 2010.

US stocks fell in a volatile day of trading as investors weighed prospects for growth against a backdrop of rising prices and tightening monetary policy. Treasuries held gains amid a steady stream of haven bids.

The S&P 500 swung back into the red in the last hour of trading, a day after the biggest single-day drop since June 2020 that erased $1.5 trillion from its market value.

Treasury yields were lower across the board amid a growing sense of angst over the health of the global economy and selloff in equity markets. Weaker than forecast US jobless claims and a sharp decline in a regional Philadelphia Fed survey also spurred a burst of buying. Gold gained while the dollar weakened against all of its Group-of-10 counterparts.

 

Other News

Elon Musk has said his $44 billion Twitter deal won’t move forward until the company’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, proves that fewer than 5% of the social media platform’s users are fake accounts.

Responding to a tweet claiming the billionaire Tesla co-founder may be looking for a better deal, Musk said his offer was based on Twitter’s SEC filings being accurate.

The company said in filings earlier this month that it estimated spam and fake accounts made up less than 5% of its active monetizable daily users.

But Musk said in his tweet on Tuesday that the actual figure could in fact be well over 20%.

The proportion of bots on Twitter has apparently become a point of contention for Musk recently, with the world’s richest man announcing last week that he had “temporarily” put the deal on hold as he waited for details of how Twitter had calculated the rate of fake accounts.

He said at the time that he was “still committed to [the] acquisition,” but added that his team would conduct its own review of a random sample of 100 followers of Twitter’s verified account.

Later, Musk said Twitter had contacted him to inform him that he had violated a non-disclosure agreement with the company by revealing that his sample size was 100 accounts.

Musk’s latest revelation comes a day after he replied with a poop emoji to a series of tweets published by Agrawal, in which the Twitter chief laid out how the company blocks and removes fake accounts from the platform.

(Fortune)