World

"What could possibly go wrong?" should be Wall Street's thesis for 2023. While it's extremely rare for stock prices to fall for two successive years, there's also nothing that suggests it can't happen, as it did from 2000-2002, 1973-1974, from 1929-1932 and then again from 1939-1941. My colleague, Bob Pisani, recently noted that those have been the only four occasions when stocks have fallen two or more years in a row since 1928. But let's look at the laundry list of risks in 2023. First, the Federal Reserve not only plans to raise rates as many as three more times early this year by a cumulative three-quarters of a percent. Fed officials have also publicly stated that once the central bank is finished raising rates, it expects to hold them high for the remainder of the year, apparentl...

STRATEGIC AMBIGUITY? The US recognises China over Taiwan diplomatically, but remains Taipei's most important ally. It opposes any forced change to Taiwan's status and is bound by an act of Congress to supply the island with the means to defend itself. Support for Taiwan is a rare issue of bipartisan consensus in Washington and there has been growing alarm over whether China might resort to a military solution, a fear heightened by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Washington has maintained a policy of "strategic ambiguity" towards Taiwan, deliberately making no firm commitment on whether it would come to its defence. That strategy was aimed at making Beijing think twice about the costs of any invasion, and also to deter Taiwan from formally declaring independence. US President Joe Biden ...

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella leaves the Elysee Palace after a meeting with the French President Emmanuel Macron in Paris on May 23, 2018. Microsoft executives on Tuesday told analysts to expect a continuation of the weak pace of business that emerged in December, which hurt the software maker's fiscal second quarter results. "In our commercial business we expect business trends that we saw at the end of December to continue into Q3," Amy Hood, Microsoft's chief financial officer, said on a conference call. In particular, the company saw less growth than expected in Microsoft 365 productivity software subscriptions, identity and security services, and business-oriented Windows products. Growth in consumption of the company's cloud computing service Azure also slowed down, she said. The ...

NEW YORK :Oil prices rose around 1 per cent on Thursday after posting the biggest two-day loss for the start of a year in three decades with U.S. data showing lower fuel inventories providing support and economic concerns capping gains. Big declines in the previous two days were driven by worries about a global recession, especially following weak short-term economic signs in the world's two biggest oil consumers, the United States and China. U.S. distillate inventories fell more than expected as a winter storm gripped the United States at the end of December, data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration showed on Thursday. U.S. gasoline stocks fell 346,000 barrels last week, the Energy Information Administration said, compared with analysts' expectations in a Reuters poll for a...

United States Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has declared that the US has hit its federal debt limit, kicking off an intense political battle that puts the global financial system at risk. Congress and the White House have until at least early June to resolve the issue. The very phrase “debt ceiling” sounds austere and restrictive, as if it’s a lid on government spending. In fact, this cap on United States government borrowing affects only the ability to pay existing bills, not to approve more spending. But it has become an explosive political issue with the potential to roil financial markets, since a failure to raise the ceiling could eventually result in a first-ever default on some of the government’s obligations. Here is what you need to know about the situation. Why is there a ...

NEW YORK : The dollar slid on Thursday in choppy trading, as a slew of data continued to show that the U.S. economy was slowing down in the wake of multiple hefty interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve, with the market anticipating a pause in tightening this year. "The market is just one-way right now: short dollars and long bonds. It's going to take some time to change that direction because the current data flow is not favorable to the Fed's stance that rates are going to stay higher for longer," said Mazen Issa, senior FX strategist at TD Securities in New York. "That may be what ends up happening. But it's harder for the Fed's message to resonate for markets after so much tightening has been done and also what the data flow has shown." The yen, on the other hand, rallied due i...

NEW DELHI :The growth of Google's Android ecosystem is on the brink of stalling in India due to an antitrust order that asks the company to change how it markets the platform, the U.S. company has said in a Supreme Court challenge seen by Reuters. The Competition Commission of India (CCI) in October fined Alphabet Inc-owned Google $161 million for exploiting its dominant position in Android, which powers 97 per cent of smartphones in India, and asked it to change restrictions imposed on smartphone makers related to pre-installing apps. Google has so far said the CCI decision will force it to change its long-standing business model, but its Indian Supreme Court filing for the first time quantifies the impact and details the changes the company will need to make. Google will need to modif...

The European Central Bank is expected to continue raising rates aggressively in the short-term as the euro zone economy proves more resilient than anticipated. Haussmann Visuals | Moment | Getty Images After China's reopening and a deluge of positive data surprises in recent weeks, economists are upgrading their previously gloomy outlooks for the global economy. Data releases last week showed signs of inflation slowing and less severe downturns in activity, prompting Barclays on Friday to raise its global growth forecast to 2.2% in 2023, up 0.5 percentage points from its last estimate in mid-November. related investing news Barclays downgrades Sunrun, cites weaker demand outlook for residential solar energy "This is largely driven by the 1.0pp increase in our China growth prediction to 4....

European countries have been scrambling to find alternative sources of oil and gas following Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in Feb. 2021. Bloomberg | Bloomberg | Getty Images Russia's revenue from fossil fuel exports collapsed in December, according to a new report, significantly hampering President Vladimir Putin's ability to finance the war in Ukraine. The findings, Ukrainian officials and campaigners say, illustrate the effectiveness of targeting Russia's oil revenue and underscore the urgent need for Western policymakers to ratchet up the financial pressure on Moscow in order to help Kyiv prevail. Published Wednesday by the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, an independent Finnish think tank, the report found the first month of the European Union's ban on seaborne i...

Brian Moynihan, CEO of Bank of America, and Jane Fraser, CEO, Citigroup, greet Rep. Al Green, D-Texas, off camera, during the House Financial Services Committee hearing titled Holding Megabanks Accountable: Oversight of Americas Largest Consumer Facing Banks, in Rayburn Building on Wednesday, September 21, 2022. Tom Williams | CQ-Roll Call, Inc. | Getty Images Tech stocks have been humbled after years of outperformance, and now there's one more comedown for the recent market leaders: losing the top ranking in the 2023 Just 100 list, an annual analysis from nonprofit Just Capital on the issues that Americans say matter most to them when it comes to corporate leadership. Bank of America ranks No. 1 on the 2023 Just 100 list, and it's not alone among peers. Banks made the most progress of an...