Markets Overview
- ASX SPI 200 futures up 0.4% to 6,986.00
- Dow Average up 0.8% to 33,087.52
- Aussie up 0.3% to 0.6498 per US$
- U.S. 10-year yield fell 8.8bps to 4.1255%
- Australia 3-year bond yield rose 14 bps to 3.51%
- Australia 10-year bond yield rose 13 bps to 4.04%
- Gold spot up 2.2% to $1,711.70
- Brent futures down 2.4% to $95.53/bbl
Economic Events
- Reserve Bank of Australia Deputy Governor Michele Bullock speaks at an event in Sydney. National Australia Bank is scheduled to report FY results.
US stocks rose for a third day as investors awaited midterm election results and monitored the selloff in crypto tokens that wiped out more than 10% from the price of Bitcoin. The dollar fell with Treasury yields.
Treasuries gained across the board Tuesday, with the benchmark 10-year rate dropping as much as 9 basis points. Meanwhile, traders shaved bets on rate hikes, with swap markets still leaning toward a 50 basis-point Fed hike in December. More notable moves were further out, with the peak reaching just above 5% in the first half of 2023.
Other News
The Swiss city of Geneva pulled the plug on its anti-drone “eagle brigade,” a program meant to train birds of prey to intercept mechanical drones in the air and safeguard dignitaries.
Officials decided to end the five-year-old project because of concerns about the welfare of the birds, the Swiss newspaper Le Matin Dimanche reported.
“The technological and strategic improvements in terms of the use of drones make this project of using raptors too uncertain, even dangerous for the physical integrity of the eagles,” the press service of the Geneva Cantonal Police told the newspaper.
The original plan, hatched in 2017, was to train the raptors to grab small mechanical drones out of the air without the machines falling to the ground.
Geneva often serves as a neutral meeting place for international summits and world leaders and the trained-eagle program was seen as part of an enhanced security effort. US President Joe Biden met with Russia’s Vladimir Putin in the Swiss city in June 2021.
Umberto Nassisi, the head of Geneva’s Falco Association, the falconery group that had been training two eagles, named Altaïr and Draco, for the program, told the newspaper he was saddened by the decision to scrap the effort.
“This represents around 100,000 francs of investment and hundreds of hours of work,” he said.
Geneva police will now focus on anti-drone tactics similar to those used by the neighboring canton of Vaud such as signal jamming, detection systems and net guns, Le Matin Dimanche reported.
Police in the Netherlands also had a short-lived drone-hunting eagle program that was ended in 2017 after a year.
