Markets Overview

  • ASX SPI 200 futures up 0.2% to 7,285.00
  • Dow Average down 0.3% to 34,299.12
  • Aussie down 0.4% to 0.6850 per US$
  • U.S. 10-year yield little changed at 3.7613%
  • Australia 3-year bond yield fell 1.9 bps to 4.00%
  • Australia 10-year bond yield fell 5.4 bps to 3.97%
  • Gold spot down 0.4% to $1,950.49
  • Brent futures down 0.7% to $76.09/bbl

Economic Events

  • 11:30: (AU) RBA Minutes of June Policy Meeting
  • 11:35: (AU) RBA’s Kent-Panel

Stocks fell Monday as concern about the global economy and the path of rates sapped the strength of a blistering second-quarter rally.

A decline of 1% in Europe’s main equity gauge swept up almost every industry. Among the biggest individual movers, Sartorius AG slumped 15% after issuing a bigger-than-expected profit warning. In Asia, disappointed hopes for further stimulus pushed down Chinese tech companies.

With the path of rates increasingly uncertain, traders are vacillating between the lure of the rally and concern it’s exhausted and that the market has become overbought.

Wall Street’s rally has now erased more than a year of Fed-induced losses, with stocks, volatility and the dollar shaking off the impact of 10 rate hikes. The S&P 500 index just capped a fifth straight week of gains and is now higher than it was the day the Federal Reserve kicked off its campaign.

US stock and bond markets were closed Monday for a holiday. Futures contracts on the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 dipped 0.1%.

Other News

She can sing. She can dance. She can cause unexpectedly high inflation in Sweden.

The kick-off of superstar Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour in Stockholm last month may have contributed to a spike in that country’s May inflation rate, according to an analysis by an economist at Danske Bank.

The findings were posted Wednesday on social media by Michael Grahn, chief economist for Sweden at the major European retail bank. The Scandinavian country reported higher-than-expected inflation of 9.7% in May.

Grahn calculated that Beyoncé’s much-hyped concert likely accounted for about 0.2 of the 0.3 percentage points added to inflation by hotels and restaurant prices in Sweden’s capital as fans flocked to her concert.

Ticket platform SeatGeek says that the average price for Beyoncé concert tickets is about $1,000, but you can find them for as low as $150. Select seats can cost up to $5,000. In May, online users in Sweden appeared to say that the average ticket for her Stockholm show was on sale for about $200.

Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour could gross between $275 million and $2.4 billion from tickets alone by the time it ends in September, according to estimates published by Forbes magazine.

Global inflation has been falling in recent months.

The U.S. consumer price index, which measures changes in a multitude of goods and services, increased just 0.1% in May, bringing the annual level down to 4% from 4.9% in April.

(USA Today)