It’s very difficult to find one word that sums up the past week, so we shall just use the word “volatile”. We realize that the word alone understates the wild swings we’ve witnessed for exchanges globally, but we’re not sure if there is a word out there that captures what we’ve seen over the past five days.
We will not sugar coat today’s market situation as performance since April, and the last couple of weeks in July in particular, has been terrible. Not only have many market indices, such as the TSX Index and the S&P 500, corrected so too have many commodity prices which does not bode well for the Canadian […]
As we get closer and closer to the August 2nd deadline for the U.S. Government to raise that country’s debt ceiling, politics enters the fray as expected. Finger pointing and whining from both Republicans and Democrats has become the norm unfortunately. Meanwhile, the markets do not like this uncertainty one bit.
Believe it or not, we just finished a week where Greece did not dominate the headlines. Instead, focus turned towards U.S. economics and monetary policy in a number of countries, including China. Canadian markets started with positive momentum thanks to a much better than expected U.S. ISM Manufacturing Index print that was posted while we were all celebrating Canada Day last week.
After a difficult week last week, equity investors were still in a selling mood on Monday as global economic concerns and a confidence vote in Greece weighed on investor sentiment. Eventually the Greek Prime Minister survived the confidence vote, providing some relief to the markets until Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke hosted his quarterly Q&A session after the Fed lowered its U.S. GDP growth forecasts for 2011 and 2012. Mr. Bernanke noted that the U.S. economy had slowed recently and attributed that performance to higher commodity prices and the global supply chain disruption caused by Japan’s earthquake and tsunami.
This week started off on a familiar note as the selling pressure we've seen since May continued for many global markets. While relatively in line, Chinese economic data gave markets a boost on Tuesday, but Greek debt concerns brought sellers back into the spotlight.
Americans had a holiday shortened week, but unfortunately their day off did little to change the tone in the markets. Disappointing economic data failed to provide any confidence to investors and continued ongoing discussion about the health of the U.S. economy and the possibility that further monetary policy actions may be required when QE2 wraps up at the end of the month.