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India reports record daily new coronavirus cases of 66,999 in latest update today

  
  Analysis
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That brings the total confirmed cases in the country to nearly 2.4 million

India is among the countries that have been hit the hardest by the pandemic as the struggle to balance between the health crisis and the economic fallout is particularly stark.

As for the health crisis, the bright side is that over 1.6 million of those infected has recovered from the disease. However, the spread is still outpacing the number of recoveries:
India
At the start of July, India reported ~220,000 active cases in the country. That figure is now ~643,000. The only positive – if you really want to look at it that way – is that the mortality sits at just ~1.9%. That is better than the ~3.2% seen in Brazil and the US.
In the bigger picture, as long as the health crisis worsens in India, it will have an impact on the global economic situation in general. Before the pandemic, there have been talks that India’s share of global growth might rival that of US, China in the next decade.
They were already among the top five – some would argue top three – contributors of global growth over the past few years, so any major setback to India will also be a setback for the global economy in that sense.

Global trade uncertainties 10 times higher than previous peak levels: IMF

  
  Analysis
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Concerns about global trade have reached nearly 10 times the peaks seen in the previous two decades, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has said.

“Globally, the trade policy uncertainty index is rising sharply, having been stable at low levels for about 20 years,” it said in a blogpost.

“The World Trade Uncertainty index jumped in the past year 10-fold from previously recorded highs as the US-China trade war escalated,” said the blogpost written by Hites Ahir, Nicholas Bloom and Davide Furceri.

The Americas and the Asia Pacific are most affected by concerns about the US-China trade war while Africa is least affected, the IMF said in a new index aimed at quantifying trade uncertainty.

The index is based on reports from the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) dating back to 1996 and borrows from the methodology used in the IMF’s own World Uncertainty Index.

To calculate the new gauge, IMF researchers counted how often the word ‘uncertainty’ appears in the EIU reports near terms such as ‘tariffs,’ ‘protectionism’ or ‘trade.’ (more…)

Week ahead: US jobs, China trade, Opec ,Wimbledon

  
  Analysis
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A high-stakes meeting between the presidents of the US and China will set the tone for markets heading into the new week, as the world’s two most important economies seek a resolution to a long-running trade dispute.

Also on tap in the US, investors await data on the labour market and manufacturing sector in a holiday-shortened week. Elsewhere, Opec members will meet to iron out oil production plans.

Here’s what to watch.

Economic data and the Fed

A fresh round of key US economic data due next week will probably factor into the Federal Reserve’s decision on interest rates in late July.

At the top of the list is the labour department’s monthly jobs report. Economists polled by Thomson Reuters anticipate an increase of 158,000 non-farm payrolls in June, which would reflect an uptick in hiring compared to the 75,000 jobs added in the prior month. The unemployment rate is expected to remain at a near 50-year low of 3.6 per cent.

Investors will also be able to parse the latest surveys from the Institute for Supply Management on the US manufacturing and services sectors, as well as reports on auto sales, factory orders and the nation’s trade balance.

The Fed’s policy-setting committee will reconvene on July 30-31, and investors expect the central bank to lower its target rate for the first time since the 2008 financial crisis amid soft inflation and uncertainty over global trade. The market has priced in a 100 per cent chance of a rate cut, with 30.2 per cent odds that officials will approve a cut of 50 basis points, according to CME Group’s FedWatch Tool which monitors Fed funds futures.

New York Fed president John Williams and Cleveland Fed president Loretta Mester — a non-voting member of the Federal Open Market Committee — are scheduled to speak at separate events on July 2. (more…)

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