Today the economic calendar is relatively empty. The most important report of the day will come out of the Reserve Bank of Australia, which is holding a monetary policy meeting today.
Update: The RBA has officially decided to leave the interest rate unchanged at 0.1%, meeting the forecasts of investors.
Other mildly interesting reports today will include Canada’s manufacturing PMI for July and the monthly factory orders for June in the United States.
Meanwhile, the coronavirus pandemic remains of primary concern to investors. The world is sitting at just under 200 million Covid-19 infections, with this milestone likely to be surpassed by the end of the day, considering daily infection rates are at around half a million cases globally right now.
The United States still remains the country with the highest total number of Covid-19 cases to date. The country has started seeing 50,000-100,000 new cases daily over the past couple of weeks among the unvaccinated population. Now, many states have announced they are bringing mask mandates back in order to contain the spread of the delta variant of the coronavirus.
China is also tightening its own Covid-19 restrictions after its own population was exposed to the delta variant. There are local lockdowns in affected provinces and reportedly trains from the most affected areas will halt for the time being.
In other news out of China, gaming companies listed in the Chinese and Hong Kong exchanges are suffering a blow today after a state newspaper criticized the effect of the gaming industry on the population, comparing them to opium. This has sparked fears that the government might be planning action against the video game industry.
In the United States, today stock indices will make modest gains as a correction of yesterday’s losses caused by the coronavirus panic. In addition, stocks might receive a boost by the ongoing earnings season, with companies such as video game giant Activision Blizzard reporting today.
In Europe, a company to keep an eye on is pharma giant Sanofi, which just agreed to purchase an mRNA company (Translate Bio) for the shockingly high sum of $3.2 billion, which is a lot more than Translate Bio’s original valuation. Sanofi might be looking to capitalize on mRNA technology as the future of vaccines and other drugs. Its stock is going up at the moment.
