With the Public Investment Fund (PIF) of Saudi Arabia topping up its holdings in US stocks, the market will take note and be of cheer especially as those stocks include Boeing, Citigroup, Bank of America and Facebook. PIF now holds $10 Billion in US stocks versus $2 Billion at the beginning of the year. Saudi Arabia is taking advantage of lower prices to diversify the nation’s wealth from an over dependence on oil. In case you are wondering PIF has total holdings of $300 Billion.
Having announced that they will lay off most of their workers, it does not look good for Air Canada despite Canada’s President Justin Trudeau making noises that he will look at ways to help the beleaguered Canadian aviation industry. The Canadian Dollar has weakened by a net 5% in the past 3 months versus the USD having at one point been as much as 10% worse. Natural resources rich Canada represents good value if one is prepared to be patient and in these times of social distancing has plenty of space with a population density of just 4 people per square kilometer versus 259 in the UK. If you can get there of course!
Portugal-the dustbin of Europe
This would be a grossly unjust description of our old ally and friend and of such an attractive country, but their reputation as such has been created by the industry that they have built in processing other European countries’ waste. The cost of processing a tone of waste in Europe is on average EUR 80 but Portugal charges just EUR 11. Portugal has called a halt to further deliveries and this is causing somewhat of a backlog with 246,000 tonnes being turned away so far this year.
Discussion and Analysis by Humphrey Percy, Chairman and Founder
Onto June A slew of strong US economic data over recent weeks had boosted expectations for how the culmination of the Fed’s two-day meeting would be presented to the public last night. The story goes back further. The narrative dominant in late-2023 of a US economy in need of restrictive monetary policy was unavoidable. The […]
Germany and the EU The Germany Supply Chain Act came into force in 2023 as a result of Germans wanting to do something good for employees in other countries in particular with respect to human rights and environmental issues. So far so good. But a combination of cost and bureaucracy overlaid with the difficulty of […]
Emergency Stop In the early hours of trading on Monday morning, sudden and significant buying pressure within USDJPY has markets wondering: is this the signal that local authorities are taking another stab at active market intervention? In a critical week for FX, with central bank decisions and a slew of top-level economic data from across […]