Good morning. European vaccine progress, Buffett's take on the economy and Apple's court fight. Here’s what’s moving markets.
Pick-Up
The European Union’s vaccination campaign picked up through April, with the bloc expecting its total deliveries to hit 188 million by today. It has also clinched a deal with Pfizer-BioNTech for a further 1.8 billion doses through to 2023 and hopes to conclude negotiations with the U.S. biotechnology company Novavax soon. Major member states, including Italy, France and Germany, are now inoculating hundreds of thousands people a day. In good news elsewhere, India's catastrophic outbreak seems to be slowing down, while the U.S. logged the fewest daily cases since late September.
Buffett Bullish
Warren Buffett delivered a clear verdict Saturday on the state of the U.S. economy as it emerges from the pandemic: red hot. “It’s almost a buying frenzy,” Berkshire Hathaway's CEO said during the conglomerate’s annual meeting, which was held virtually from Los Angeles. “People have money in their pocket and they’re paying higher prices,” he said. Buffett also conceded mistakes made during a historically volatile year, including the move to reduce Berkshire's Apple stake and to sell U.S. airline stocks ahead of the sector's recovery.
Battle Royale
In a high-stakes court fight starting in Oakland, California today, Apple once again faces videogame studio Epic Games. Epic, whose flagship title Fortnite Battle Royale was removed from the App Store in the course of a fight between the tech firms last year, is arguing that Apple's marketplace is anti-competitive, generating high profit margins at app developers' expense. Apple counters that the 30% commission it charges most developers is justified by the App Store's development costs, and is typical across similar platforms. The court clash may reveal the App Store's true profitability to the public for the first time.
Verizon's Ad Exit
A deal for U.S. telecoms giant Verizon to sell its media division to Apollo could be announced as soon as today, according to people with knowledge of the matter. Verizon will keep a stake in the business, they said, and talks could still fall through as no final decision has been made. With the potential sale, which could fetch as much as $5 billion, Verizon would unload the remnants of an ambitious but distracting foray into online advertising. Last year, the group agreed to sell the HuffPost online news service to BuzzFeed, and in 2019 it sold the blogging platform Tumblr.
Coming Up…
Take a moment to catch your breath -- with Britain, China and Japan off on holiday it's a quiet morning in the middle of first-quarter earnings season. Results are due from Siemens Healthineers, and diagnostics firm Qiagen is expected to report after markets close. The U.S. earnings highlight in the afternoon will be cosmetics giant Estee Lauder. On the economics front, final manufacturing purchasing managers' index readings are due from the Euro area and the U.S., while German retail sales are expected to show an acceleration during March.
What We’ve Been Reading
This is what’s caught our eye over the past 24 hours.
And finally, here's what Emily Barrett is interested in this morning
When will central banks stop buying so many bonds? That’s the talk of the Street, even as the Fed and ECB insist this isn’t the time to talk about tapering, with the global recovery still finding its feet. But the conversation isn’t exactly going away -- this month marks the eighth anniversary of the beginnings of the Taper Tantrum that saw borrowing costs surge around the world on the slightest hint of a pullback in asset purchases post-GFC. The Bank of Canada has already taken its first steps, a move that helped make the loonie the best-performing currency this year, along with soaring commodities prices. Markets are riveted to the Bank of England’s meeting this week for similar hints, with strategists at Bank of America and NatWest Markets among the smaller camp that sees cutbacks announced as soon as this week. Policy makers in the U.K. are facing more pressure than most to revise pandemic-mode monetary settings, as the latest statistics suggest the country is making strong progress toward herd immunity, and the latest purchasing managers indexes showed activity accelerating at the fastest pace since, well, 2013. For his part, Jerome Powell is still repeating that mantra that he’s not ready to consider trimming the central bank’s $120 billion monthly bond purchases, though last week brought the first stirrings of dissent from his colleague Robert Kaplan in Dallas (albeit not a current voter on the rate-setting committee). Powell’s unrelentingly dovish stance has kept benchmark rates in the world’s largest bond market roughly in check, judging by the implied volatility reflected in ICE BofA’s MOVE Index, which has hit a two-month low. But it will be interesting to see what happens as more central bankers start eyeing the QE exit.
Emily Barrett is a cross-asset reporter and editor for Bloomberg News in Tokyo.
Like Bloomberg's Five Things? Subscribe for unlimited access to trusted, data-based journalism in 120 countries around the world and gain expert analysis from exclusive daily newsletters, The Bloomberg Open and The Bloomberg Close.
— With assistance by Emily Barrett
"stock" - Google News
May 03, 2021 at 12:30PM
https://ift.tt/2PNkCQ6
Stock Markets Today - Bloomberg
"stock" - Google News
https://ift.tt/37YwtPr
https://ift.tt/3b37xGF
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Stock Markets Today - Bloomberg"
Post a Comment