As of today, the coronavirus has infected over 161.1 million people worldwide. The global infection rate seems to be going down at the moment, as the majority of countries are not experiencing serious outbreaks at the moment.
India (23.7 million cases) is still seeing daily Covid-19 infection numbers above 350,000 but it seems to be past the peak of the outbreak (which was above 400K new cases per day). The situation there is still critical but the fact that cases are not increasing by as much daily as they were a week ago is encouraging.
Brazil (15.3 million cases) is the second most serious hotspot for the virus at the moment. The infection rate has gone down slightly but on average remains above 70,000 new Covid-19 cases per day, which is the level the country has maintained for the past three months.
Good news on the Covid-19 front are coming from the United States (33.5 million cases in total), where the daily infection rate continues dropping and has gone down below 40,000 per day, numbers last seen in September of last year, before the new highly-contagious variant of Covid-19 sparked a much more severe wave of infections around the world.
As for fundamental reports, the biggest highlight today is the jobless data from the United States. In light of higher inflation but incredibly disappointing NFP reports, investors are especially interested in the US labor market, as it has become the most reliable metric for the Federal Reserve when it comes to economic growth.
The initial jobless claims this week amounted to 473K, which is slightly better than the forecast, though continuing claims met the forecast exactly. Thus, this data was a bit more encouraging than last week’s NFPs, but it is also slightly less significant.
US stock indices today are likely going to extend yesterday’s losing streak. Inflation rate readings yesterday were considerably higher than expected, which has caused investors to doubt that the Federal Reserve will wait until 2023 for a hike if inflation keeps rising so quickly. Any hawkishness from the Fed before then will affect stocks negatively.
Of interest today will be Disney and AirBnB, who will be sharing their latest earnings reports. Both are likely to benefit from the end of coronavirus restrictions in the United States and other parts of the world; AirBnB due to increased travel, and Disney thanks to the reopening of one of its most profitable subsidiaries - the Disneyworld theme parks.
Meanwhile, Tesla CEO Elon Musk became responsible for yet another massive trend change among cryptocurrencies, this time for the worse. Musk announced that Tesla will no longer accept payments in Bitcoin due to environmental concerns (the coal involved in producing energy to power up some of the world’s most well-known cryptocurrency mining regions).
