Markets Overview
- ASX SPI 200 futures down 0.1% to 6,717.00
- Dow Average down 0.2% to 30,348.25
- Aussie up 0.1% to 0.6279 per US$
- U.S. 10-year yield rose 9.7bps to 4.2304%
- Australia 3-year bond yield rose 12 bps to 3.63%
- Australia 10-year bond yield rose 12 bps to 4.06%
- Gold spot down 0.1% to $1,627.14
- Brent futures up 0.2% to $92.59/bbl
Economic Events
- 11:00: (AU) Australia to Sell A$700 Million 3.25% 2025 Bonds
It was another down day for stocks, with Treasury yields climbing amid hawkish remarks from Federal Reserve officials and swaps pricing in a 5% peak policy rate in 2023. The pound wavered after Liz Truss resigned as UK prime minister.
The wariness around economic challenges has been so pronounced that it doesn’t take much to see the S&P 500 dropping at least 1% after posting a rally of the same magnitude earlier in the day. It happened again Thursday, with the gauge seeing intraday swings of that size in both directions for the 16th time in 2022 — the most for any year since the financial crisis.
Volatility is showing no signs of abating ahead of Friday’s $2 trillion options expiration and another raft of corporate earnings.
Other News
On British social media, the Liz Truss era began with cheese and pork and ended with a rotting lettuce. The mockery scarcely paused in between.
One of Ms. Truss’s defining talents as a politician has been her willingness to embrace a provocative message and to provide visuals to match — even at the risk of looking foolish.
That helped her win the Conservative Party leadership, with outfits seemingly designed to evoke Margaret Thatcher and remarks that could have been calibrated to annoy cautious centrists. (Asked whether President Emmanuel Macron of France was a friend or foe, she replied: “The jury’s out.”)
It also, however, made her an exceptionally rich source of memes. A British political writer, Tom Hamilton, could run a Twitter “World Cup of Liz Truss Gifs” as long ago as 2017. The two finalists, both from a 2014 speech while she was Britain’s agriculture secretary, gained international circulation as she closed in on Downing Street. The runner-up was her emphatic reaction to the high proportion of its cheese Britain imported, and the winner was her suggestive description of a trade opportunity in China:
Her sometimes eccentric manner continued to provide viral clips, but perhaps the most galling indignity came from a more traditional British source: a tabloid. The Daily Star, picking up a glancing line in The Economist about the shelf life of Ms. Truss’s policies, put her head and a 70-cent head of iceberg on its front page, with the question: “Which wet lettuce will last longer?”
The lettuce has returned for at least three subsequent front pages, and also has a live webcam, on which it has acquired googly eyes and a wig, among other accessories.
In the end, her own members of Parliament appeared to join in the ridicule. Robert Langan, a Conservative lawmaker representing a chunk of the Peak District National Park, chose to highlight a column he had written for his local newspaper on dumpster fires: “Indeed, the act of extinguishing the flames could well be the end of the skip they originated in. But urgent action is necessary nevertheless.”
A parliamentary colleague endorsed the warning. By then, the blaze looked to be well out of Ms. Truss’s control.
(New York Times)
