FT : US junk bond market shrinks as rising rates put off borrowers

US junk bond market shrinks as rising rates put off borrowers
High-yield market contracts 13% from 2021 peak amid fears of false signals about American economy’s health

The $1.35tn US junk bond market has shrunk by almost $200bn since its all-time peak in late 2021, helping to anchor prices at levels that investors say could give false signals about the health of the world’s largest economy.

A steep rise in interest rates since early last year has helped deter companies from selling new bonds, while several companies have climbed out of the high-yield market into investment grade territory.
Meanwhile, more borrowers are turning to private markets for fresh funds. Altogether, this has wiped 13 per cent off the total value of US junk bonds in issue since the record high.

That shrinkage has left investors with less choice about what they can buy and has pushed some fund managers to purchase bonds they might not otherwise have picked. That is helping prop up junk bond prices, even though many market participants continue to anticipate some form of economic slowdown.

“Dramatically lower issuance” is “really underpinning the asset class in terms of valuations”, said Andrzej Skiba, head of BlueBay US fixed income at RBC Global Asset Management.

“We’ve got cash building every month . . . You end up just buying the same stuff over and over,” added Dan DeYoung, high-yield portfolio manager at $584bn investment firm Columbia Threadneedle. 

Those dynamics are threatening to give overly positive signals about the health of the economy, some investors believe. They are also potentially lining up the bond market for a sharper decline if the outlook darkens — particularly those of lowly rated companies that failed to extend the maturity of their debt when money was cheap.

“It’s asymmetric,” said Marty Fridson, a veteran high-yield investor and chief investment officer at Lehmann, Livian, Fridson Advisors. “These conditions can cause the market to be overvalued, but they don’t protect you from a huge sell-off and a gapping down in prices when things turn around.”

While a lack of supply has helped keep spreads low, “as we move into year-end, there are concerns that as recessionary headwinds start hitting the markets, we will see volatility pick up and spreads widen,” said Anders Persson, fixed income chief investment officer at Nuveen.

For decades, the high-yield bond market was the mainstay of risky borrowers, growing in size at an annualised pace of 8.7 per cent between 1996 and 2020, according to an analysis by Fridson. It later expanded to a record $1.55tn in 2021, as ultra-low interest rates sparked a dealmaking frenzy.

But issuance slumped in 2022, and while the amount of money raised has since climbed 30 per cent year on year to $90bn in the first half of 2023, this largely reflects refinancings. New borrowings in the first half of this year numbered just 39, totalling $33.2bn. That marks the lowest year-to-date deal count as of June 30 since 1995, Dealogic data shows, and the lowest by dollar amount since 2009.

“We are trading at probably tighter spreads than otherwise would be the case if we had a more vibrant primary market,” said Skiba.


Junk bond yields have shot to 8.69 per cent as of July 11 from a low of 4.53 per cent in the wake of the Covid-19 crisis. While most of that increase is accounted for by Fed rate rises, the spread — the extra yield demanded by investors to hold risky bonds over US Treasuries — has simultaneously widened out to 4.05 percentage points from roughly 3 percentage points.

Still, that level was narrower than at the start of 2023 and than the historical average of 4.58 percentage points for high-yield bonds outside of recessionary periods, said Fridson.

Investors note that economic indicators, including jobs market data, have so far been more buoyant than many had feared, despite the Fed’s aggressive tightening campaign, although figures on Friday showed that jobs growth slowed more than expected in June.

“That slowdown will manifest itself sooner or later,” said Skiba, speaking ahead of Friday’s jobs data, noting “the Fed’s rates being deeply in restrictive territory, and also the double-whammy from US banks — particularly regional banks — curbing lending activity”.

“I view the high-yield asset class, especially double-Bs, [as] fairly vulnerable if we do move into a recession that’s not just a very minor and shallow and brief recession,” said Adam Abbas, co-head of fixed income at Harris Associates, referencing the highest-quality rung of junk credit.

Ratings upgrades have also compressed the high-yield market, supporting prices. More than $81bn of debt has reached investment-grade status already this year, according to a Goldman Sachs analysis of major rating agencies’ actions, compared with $116bn throughout 2022. Just $15.6bn of debt had dropped down to junk as of late June.


For Lotfi Karoui, Goldman’s chief credit strategist, supply shrinkage this year “is entirely driven by rising stars exceeding fallen angels”, although many recent upgrades reflect a “backlog essentially of rising star candidates that should have probably been upgraded in late 2020, mid-2021”.

Toymaker Mattel, streaming giant Netflix, energy company Occidental Petroleum and insurer Enact are among the US companies that Moody’s has upgraded to investment-grade status in 2023.

Rating agencies move independently, with S&P lifting Netflix to investment-grade in late 2021.

More upgrades could follow, analysts and investors suggested, highlighting companies that were downgraded in 2020 and have not yet moved back upwards, such as car giant Ford.

High-yield bonds are not the only shrinking asset class. The $1.4tn junk loan market has also contracted this year for only the second time since 2010, with private credit again blamed for being a magnet pulling borrowers away from public debt.

UBS estimates that the private credit market has reached $1.55tn, up from $1tn in 2019. While drivers vary, some noted the greater certainty of execution in non-public transactions and fewer lenders involved.

Karoui said it was more of a “natural substitution” for loan issuers to switch to private credit than for bond issuers to do so. Still, “there’s no question that the depth of financing that is offered by private debt markets has increased dramatically”.

FT : Meta to release commercial AI model in effort to catch rivals

Meta to release commercial AI model in effort to catch rivals
Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google are surging ahead in Silicon Valley development race

Meta is poised to release a commercial version of its artificial intelligence model, allowing start-ups and businesses to build custom software on top of the technology.

The move will allow Meta to compete with Microsoft-backed OpenAI and Google, which are surging ahead in the race to develop generative AI. The software, which can create text, images and code, is powered by large language models (LLMs) that are trained on huge amounts of data and require vast computing power.

Meta released its own language model, known as LLaMA, to researchers and academics earlier this year, but the new version will be more widely available and customisable by companies, three people familiar with the plans said.
The release is expected imminently, one of the people said.

Meta says its LLMs are “open-source”, by which it means details of the new model will be released publicly. This contrasts with the approach of competitors such as OpenAI, whose latest model GPT-4 is a so-called black box in which the data and code used to build the model are not available to third parties.

“The competitive landscape of AI is going to completely change in the coming months, in the coming weeks maybe, when there will be open source platforms that are actually as good as the ones that are not,” vice-president and chief AI scientist at Meta, Yann LeCun, said at a conference in Aix-en-Provence last Saturday.

Meta’s impending release comes as a race among Silicon Valley tech groups to establish themselves as dominant AI participants is heating up.

Writing in the Financial Times this week, Meta’s global affairs chief Nick Clegg extolled the virtues of an open source approach, saying “openness is the best antidote to the fears surrounding AI”. But the move also helps Meta in its attempts to catch up with rivals, as an open model would allow companies of all sizes to improve the technology and build applications on it.

Meta has been working on AI research and development for more than a decade but has appeared to be on the back foot after OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a conversational chatbot, was released in November, spurring other Big Tech groups to launch similar products.

“The goal is to diminish the current dominance of OpenAI,” said one person with knowledge of high-level strategy at Meta.

Meta declined to comment.

While Meta’s technology is open source and currently free, two people familiar with the matter said the company had been exploring charging enterprise customers for the ability to fine-tune the model to their needs by using their own proprietary data. One person said there were no current plans to charge and Meta would not do so in the upcoming release.

Joelle Pineau, Meta’s vice-president of AI research, declined to comment on the development of a new AI model and how it might be monetised but said: “At the end of the day, because you release something [open source], you don’t completely give up on the intellectual property of that work.”

“We haven’t been shy about the fact that we do want to be using these models [in our] products,” she added.

In 2021, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced a pivot to build an avatar-filled digital world known as a metaverse and has spent more than $10bn a year on the project. That costly ambition has proven unpopular with investors and Meta has recently raced to increase its AI investment. 

Earlier this year, the social networking giant set up a generative AI unit led by chief product officer Chris Cox. Pineau said Cox’s team straddled the research side of AI but also product development, as it was “creating totally new businesses”.

Zuckerberg and other executives have hinted at a push towards creating multiple AI chatbots for individuals, advertisers and businesses across Meta platforms Instagram, WhatsApp and Facebook, powered by its LLMs.

The benefit of open source models includes a higher take-up by users who then input more data for the AI to process. The more data an LLM has, the more powerful its capabilities can become.

Furthermore, open source models allow researchers and developers to spot and address bugs, improving the technology and security simultaneously — at a time when technology companies such as Meta have faced years of scrutiny over various privacy and misinformation scandals. 

While providing software for free can seem antithetical to making money, experts believe corporations can also use this strategy to capture new markets. 

“Meta realised they were behind on the current AI hype cycle, and this gives them a way to open up the ecosystem and seem like they are doing the right thing, being charitable and giving back to the community,” said one person familiar with the company’s thinking.

Still, there are clear risks with open source AI, which can be shaped and abused by bad actors. Child safety groups report a rise in child sexual abuse imagery generated by AI online, for instance.

Researchers also found that a previous Meta AI model, BlenderBot 2, released in 2021, was spreading misinformation. Meta said it made the BlenderBot 3 more resistant to this content, although users still found it generated false information.

There are also regulatory and legal risks concerning intellectual property and copyright.
On Monday, comedian and actor Sarah Silverman filed a lawsuit against Meta and OpenAI over claims her work was used to train models without her consent.

Meta released its open source model LLaMA to researchers in February. A month later, it leaked more widely via the online forum 4chan, prompting developers to build on top of it in breach of Meta’s licensing rules, which specify it should not be used in commercial products.

“This model is out there in ways that we wish it wasn’t,” Pineau said.

Other AI companies, such as French start-up Mistral, are also examining the potential of releasing open source versions of their technology. OpenAI, which has released open source AI models for speech and image recognition previously, said its team was looking into developing an open source LLM, provided they were able to reduce the risks of misuse below a minimum threshold. 

“We have a choice between deciding that artificial intelligence is too dangerous a technology to remain open and putting it under lock and key and in the hands of a small number of companies that will control it,” Meta’s AI chief LeCun said. “Or, on the contrary, open source platforms that call for contributions . . . from all over the world.”

FT : As Chinese cars speed into global markets, tensions will only escalate

As Chinese cars speed into global markets, tensions will only escalate
Security dilemmas and the threat to Europe’s industrial base raise questions for governments


China’s emergence as the world’s largest auto exporter caught many people — including the biggest carmakers — by surprise.
Cars used to be a rare type of manufacture in which western companies retained durable technological advantages. The transition to electric vehicles has given Chinese companies an opportunity to leap ahead, threatening to reshape trade flows in the process.

The surge of Chinese cars into foreign markets poses two dilemmas that will complicate trade. The first relates to security. New cars feature dozens of sensors, complex software systems and semi-autonomous capabilities. Western leaders have only just begun to consider the security implications of fleets of foreign-made, sensor-stuffed cars on their roads. Beijing, by contrast, has imposed strict data localisation rules on Tesla — China is its biggest market outside the US — and banned Tesla’s cars from sensitive locations.

Italy’s recent decision to limit a Chinese shareholder’s influence in Pirelli, a leading tyremaker, signals a change. The Italian government may be partly motivated by protectionism but it also cited Pirelli’s advanced Cyber Tyre, which collects and transmits driving data, as a rationale for curbing China’s influence in the company. Now even tyremakers are tech companies, the auto industry is unprepared for an intensified focus on security concerns about Chinese cars.

The second challenge is to Europe’s industrial base. Legacy automakers, especially in the price-sensitive middle market, face tough competition. Chinese cars source components mostly from Asia, not from Europe; facing a surge of Chinese car imports, some European businesses are calling for help.
Chinese EVs are high quality, though their price competitiveness has benefited from a decade of protectionism and government support totalling tens of billions of dollars annually.
Western car companies are no strangers to bailouts or public ownership stakes, but the scale of support to China’s EV industry far exceeds other states’ generosity.

History suggests that governments will be loath to let their companies lose auto market share. Japan’s success in selling to US consumers in the 1970s and 1980s caused tariff threats and currency disputes, leading American auto workers to bash Japanese cars with baseball bats. Tension was defused only when Japanese companies opened factories in the US.

This time, the US is not bashing China’s cars but copying its methods, imposing major trade barriers such as the Trump-era 27.5 per cent tariff on imports of all Chinese vehicles. Now, Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act provides generous subsidies for EVs that meet local content thresholds, excluding Chinese vehicles. In the face of these tariffs and subsidies, Chinese companies simply can’t compete in the US.

But the EU’s car market remains open to imports.
The continent’s EV subsidies have caused a surge of imports — partly because Chinese cars are cheaper and partly because European automakers were late in rolling out competitive EVs of their own.
European nations are beginning to debate the wisdom of this approach. German automakers oppose protectionism lest Beijing respond by limiting their access to the vast Chinese market. France, however, recently announced environmental rules that, in practice, will ensure EV subsidies only apply to cars made in Europe. Senior French politicians call for dumping investigations — and even tariffs.

News that Chinese EV makers now face overcapacity at home escalates these concerns. Nio, one of the country’s leading EV start-ups, cut prices by $4,200 per car in June, responding to slowing demand in China. From China’s playbook in sectors from steel to solar panels, domestic overcapacity may be addressed by ramping up cut-price exports.

If so, the implications for trade would be wide ranging. Trade in car parts and finished autos exceeds $1tn annually. Alongside electronics, autos are one of the most complex and internationalised supply chains.

Escalating auto trade tension would have an impact on another sector that has seen plenty of recent disputes: semiconductors. A typical EV has more than $1,000 of semiconductor content inside. The chips that manage EV power supply are mostly produced by western companies. If Chinese cars are locked out of foreign markets, will foreign chips be allowed in Chinese cars? Beijing would need only to point towards the IRA’s local content requirements as justification for further splintering trade in one of the world’s most globalised industries.

FT : Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, BNP’s longtime ‘introvert’ boss

Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, BNP’s longtime ‘introvert’ boss
Head of eurozone’s biggest bank faces challenges from energy transition to his own succession

Most chief executives might be tempted by the limelight if they had spent more than a decade running the eurozone’s biggest bank and outperformed regional rivals blighted by crises.

Not Jean-Laurent Bonnafé, who if anything has retreated farther from view in his 12 years in charge of BNP Paribas.

“I’m just the one who succeeded someone else,” the 61-year-old told the Financial Times in a rare interview in Paris. “The bank was incorporated in 1848 and is here to stay for a very long period of time. This is a team.”

But although he may prefer to hide from view, Bonnafé has a set of challenges that will eventually define his record at the French bank — not least that of assuring his own succession, even if BNP’s bylaws allow him to stay on until 2028.

During a tenure that has included the eurozone crisis and the coronavirus pandemic, BNP’s shares have held up better than most of its European peers but its price-to-book ratio of 0.54 lags behind those of some, including HSBC and Santander and particularly most big US lenders.

The bank has cemented its status as one of Europe’s top corporate financiers and is further bolstering its ambitions as the continent’s go-to investment bank, beating one-time potent rivals Deutsche Bank and Barclays by revenue, although Wall Street banks remain by far the market leaders.


As he looks to deliver on a promise of higher returns over the next two years, Bonnafé must now prepare BNP for a greener makeover — a source of growing scrutiny as climate campaigners who accuse it of not dropping fossil fuels fast enough bring lawsuits against the bank and plaster the elusive chief executive’s face on protest posters.

At the same time, BNP has a “steady-as-she-goes” reputation to uphold, with a streak of regular quarterly profits over the past decade marred only by the $9bn in penalties the bank faced for US sanctions-busting in 2014.

“In a sector in which it’s tough to sleep easy, BNP is seen as a higher-quality, safer organisation,” said Barclays analyst Amit Goel. 

Bonnafé is more positive than some peers about the threat posed to banks by the rapid reversal of ultra-low interest rates in Europe and the US, with the industry having ratcheted up its defences and regulatory buffers since the 2008 financial crisis.

That is despite growing warnings of a looming plunge in commercial real estate and company valuations, the collapse this year of Californian lender Silicon Valley Bank and the forced takeover of long-suffering Credit Suisse by its Swiss rival UBS.

“So far, yes, there were some isolated issues, but no major global problem,” Bonnafé said, adding: “I am a bit conflicted to say this is great, but if we try to look calmly at the situation maybe 15 years before, the system would be in a very different shape.”

In his time running BNP, calmness has been among Bonnafé’s trademarks.

“He’s always been very self-contained,” said Olivier Andriès, chief executive of jet engine maker Safran and a former classmate both at the Polytechnique engineering school and the elite Corps des mines, a training ground for French civil servants. “I’ve never known him to fly off the handle.”

BNP insiders and rival bankers credit Bonnafé for creating a tightly managed operation that has proved conservative on risks and costs, with some describing a highly hierarchical internal culture.

While French media have cited one of his nicknames as J’Lo, a riff on his shared initials with US pop star Jennifer Lopez, some employees raised less flattering monikers — including “the Supreme Soviet”.

Bonnafé’s reserve goes beyond his public persona, even if he is no stranger to establishment circles. Some French officials said he was a mystery to them, an anomaly for the head of a lender that was state-owned until the year he joined in 1993 — at the start of a wave of French privatisations — and remains a go-to bank for the French government.

BNP, which has remained France’s dominant primary dealer for government bonds, was instrumental in orchestrating emergency state-backed loan schemes funnelled via French banks during the pandemic.

Born to a family from the southern city of Albi, Bonnafé initially followed in his EDF engineer father’s footsteps in his studies.

At Polytechnique, a recruiting ground for blue-chip French companies, he rubbed shoulders with other future European bank bosses including Tidjane Thiam of Credit Suisse, Jean Pierre Mustier of UniCredit and Société Générale’s Frédéric Oudéa.

A lover of classical music, one of Bonnafé’s few public pursuits is as head of the Friends of the Paris Opera, where he entertains big clients.
Another yearly outing is the Roland-Garros tennis tournament.
However, people who know him professionally struggle to detail how he spends his downtime.

“He’s an introvert,” said one senior banker who has known him for years. “He’s not going to tell you what he did on the weekend, or only if you really force him.”

Corporate bosses are more forthcoming. Bonnafé’s first job at BNP was to manage big clients, after a stint at France’s ministry of industry and in private equity.

Arthur Sadoun, who once advised BNP on campaigns as a publicist, said Bonnafé gave him counsel when he became chief executive of advertising group Publicis in 2017.

“He spent a lot of time telling me ‘it will be hard but you’ll get there’.”

Rodolphe Saadé, head of Marseille-based shipping group CMA CGM, described Bonnafé as a straight talker: “He says things the way he sees them . . . when something is not possible he’ll say so”.

Bonnafé made his mark at BNP pursuing some of its biggest mergers, including a double bid for SocGen and Paribas in 1999 when he was head of strategy. The first offer was eventually dropped. 

He later helped integrate Italy’s Banco Nazionale di Lavoro, which BNP acquired in 2006, as well as Fortis’s operations in Belgium and Luxembourg. Internally, he has made little secret over how laborious the BNL deal was, after BNP had to grapple with its poor quality loan book — a cautionary tale for other cross-border mergers. 

Bonnafé has since favoured smaller deals, including the 2019 purchase of Deutsche Bank’s prime brokerage operations that serve hedge funds, to boost its standing in equities markets.

He has insisted a €7.6bn war chest set aside from the $16.3bn sale of US retail business Bank of the West will be spent on IT and system upgrades and incremental acquisitions to build up scale in areas such as asset management, insurance and consumer finance.

A diversified business, from car leasing group Arval to a wealth management arm, has also helped BNP’s steady growth. BNP used its balance sheet aggressively during the pandemic, expanding it by €500bn in mere months, to win over loan-starved corporate clients across Europe when US rivals temporarily retrenched.

The group reported a record €10.2bn annual profit in 2022.

When asked where he and the bank might go from here, Bonnafé shifted to the much broader challenge lenders face in serving societies that must rapidly transition to cleaner energy models.

He wants the bank to be at the forefront of clients’ financing needs for new infrastructure, and insisted BNP was now reducing its support to the oil and gas sector — albeit at its own pace, and not one that he said could “kill the economy”.

“There’s a lot to do,” Bonnafé said. “The last time was maybe just after the second world war if you look at the magnitude of what we need to invest to implement the transition.”

How long he will stay on to see that through is unclear. No dauphin has yet been anointed at a bank that has tended to promote from within.

In the words of one rival banker, “the only real thing Bonnafé has left to prove is to succeed in his exit, and leave at the right time before it’s deemed too long”.

>>> US After Hours Summary: Quiet after hours; CYRX -24.5% lower on weak guidanc

After Hours Summary: Quiet after hours; CYRX -24.5% lower on weak guidance; MLKN -3.6% lower on earnings; VSAT -20.9% falls on satellite mishap

After Hours Gainers:

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: None

Companies trading higher in after hours in reaction to news: WFRD +2.9% (awarded contract in Brazil), NEXT +2.7% (makes final decision to construct the first three liquefaction trains at Rio Grande LNG), LGF.A +2.6% (files Form 10 in connection with planned separation of its Studio and Starz units), AB +1.7% (reports June AUM), DIS +0.8% (extends CEO Iger's contract by 2 years), ROKU +0.6% (launches partnership with FreeWheel), R +0.2% (increases dividend)

After Hours Losers:

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to earnings/guidance: CYRX -24.5% (guides Q2 and FY23 revs below consensus), MLKN -3.6%

Companies trading lower in after hours in reaction to news: VSAT -20.9% (unexpected event may impact performance of ViaSat-3 Americas satellite), BLFS -7.2% (in sympathy with weak guidance from CYRX), IVZ -2.2% (reports June AUM), GTE -2% (provides operational update), BCYC -1% (commences $200 mln ADS offering), BEN -0.1% (reports June AUM), GWW -0.1% (to open distribution center in Oregon), TEAM -0.1% (Director sold 10000 shares)

>>> Google Quantum Computer Is '47 Years' Faster Than #1 Supercomputer

Google Quantum Computer Is '47 Years' Faster Than #1 Supercomputer

Progress towards fully capable and practical quantum computers isn't slowing down, and researchers from Google are the latest to announce a significant step forward in the capabilities of today's machines.


While we call these devices quantum computers, they're more like prototypes of what quantum computers can be: At present they require super-specific, extreme conditions to operate in, and struggle to stay stable and error-free.

Despite those limitations, their computing potential is becoming more impressive all the time.

The latest system run by Google has a total of 70 operational qubits – the quantum equivalents of classical bits that can represent 1, or 0, or both at the same time, potentially allowing for certain calculations to be performed at astonishing speeds.

Specifically, the team used a complex, synthetic benchmark called random circuit sampling, which is exactly what it sounds like – taking readings from randomly generated quantum processes.

This maximizes the speed of critical actions, reducing the risk of outside noise destroying the calculation. They then estimated how long it would take existing supercomputers to run the same sums.


"We conclude that our demonstration is firmly in the regime of beyond-classical quantum computation," write the researchers in their recent paper.

The Frontier supercomputer, currently the most powerful computer in the world, would take a little over 47 years to crunch the same numbers, the researchers suggest, whereas the Sycamore quantum computer managed it in mere seconds.

A group including Google engineers did something similar in 2019, with 53 qubits. Then, as now, there's a debate to be had about how useful and practical these particular simulations are, and how fair (or otherwise) it is to compare supercomputer performance to what has been managed here.

Nevertheless, the Google team is clear in its claims that this demonstrates quantum supremacy: the idea that quantum computers really can deal with processes above and beyond anything that even the fastest classical computers can cope with.


The new experiments also tell us more about how quantum noise – the inherent uncertainty and fragility in a quantum computer as it operates in the fuzzy landscape of probabilities – can have an impact on processes as they're running, and in some cases lead to new phases (or states) in a quantum system.

Working through this noise to correctly record qubit states is essential in getting quantum computers functioning properly, and we've seen scientists try and tackle the problem in a variety of ways in the past.

According to Steve Brierley, chief executive at quantum company Riverlane in the UK, these latest experiments represent another "major milestone" in quantum computing research.

"The squabbling about whether we had reached, or indeed could reach, quantum supremacy is now resolved," Brierley told The Telegraph.

A paper on the new research is available on arXiv but has yet to be peer reviewed

>>> What to look at today - 11th of July 2023

Stocks rallied across Asia after China stepped up support for its struggling property sector, heightening speculation that more aid is on the way. The yuan strengthened while the dollar dropped. A gauge of regional equities advanced more than 1%, halting a four-day decline, with the biggest gains in Hong Kong and Taiwan. Investors welcomed news that two Chinese regulators stepped up pressure on financial institutions to ease terms for property companies by encouraging negotiations to extend outstanding loans. Benchmark indexes also gained in Japan, South Korea and Australia. Asian chip stocks rose after Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. reported better-than-expected sales and their US peers climbed Monday, further buoying sentiment. US stock futures were little changed after the S&P 500 Index edged up 0.2% Monday. The dollar weakened against all of its Group-of-10 peers, extending losses made Monday when Treasury yields declined. Government bonds gained in Australia and New Zealand. The yen advanced beyond 141 per dollar to its strongest level in more than three weeks.  Investors in Asia continue to expect more concrete steps from Beijing to bolster the nation’s tepid recovery. China’s stuttering economy is already having a wide-ranging impact on markets, with the chairman of mining giant Rio Tinto Group this week warning of knock-on effects to demand for industrial metals. The offshore yuan extended gains into a fourth day as state-run financial newspapers in China ran reports Tuesday flagging the likely adoption of more property support policies, along with measures to boost business confidence. China’s economic troubles come as many other countries contend with a different issue — stubbornly high inflation and rising interest rates. In Monday’s session on Wall Street, traders sifted through remarks from a slew of Federal Reserve speakers while awaiting Wednesday’s consumer price index data that will help determine the path for rate hikes.  China’s economic troubles come as many other countries contend with a different issue — stubbornly high inflation and rising interest rates. In Monday’s session on Wall Street, traders sifted through remarks from a slew of Federal Reserve speakers while awaiting Wednesday’s consumer price index data that will help determine the path for rate hikes.  US After Hours WDFC +4.7% up on solid MayQ results; VRDN -18.4% lower on trial data; PSMT -3.8% edging lower following earnings.

Nikkei -0,05% Hang Seng +1,53% CSI +0,63% Shanghai +0,48% Shenzen +0,55%

Eur$ 1,1016 CNH 7,2074 CNY 7,2055 JPY 140,70 GBP 1,2879 CHF 0,8844 RUB 90,9425 TRY 26,0900 WTI$ 73,46 Gold 1928,70 BTC 30,477 ETH 1,879

S&P +0,08% Nasdaq +0,08% EuroStoxx +0,30% FTSE -0,08% Dax +0,39% SMI

Macro :
- Citi’s Montagu Says Investors Cut Leverage to US Stocks Slightly
- Rally in Bitcoin Mining Stocks Sets Shorts Up for Squeeze
- Chinese Miner in Talks to Tap Argentina Lithium for EV Batteries
- US May Consumer Credit Rose $7.2b; Est. Up $20b
- London Bank Bonuses Plunged Across Board in 2022’s Deal Drought

Keep an eye on :
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- AM FP : France Nears €3 Billion Fighter Deal for India in Modi Arms Push
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- F US : Ford’s EV Battery Partner SK On Targets US Growth Over Profit
- LLOY LN : Nine UK Pension Funds Agree to Invest 5% of Assets in Startups
- NANO FP : Nanobiotix, Johnson & Johnson Gain After Signing License Pact
- NOD NO : Nordic Semiconductor 2Q Ebitda Beats Estimates
- NYF SS : Nyfosa 2Q Net Income Beats Estimates
- PEUG FP : Peugeot Invest Owns 14.4% of LISI After Capital Reorganization
- RNO FP : Renault, China’s Geely Move Forward With Powertrain Tie-Up
- SENS SW : Sensirion Cuts FY Revenue Forecast, Misses Estimates
- TOP DC : Topdanmark Sees 2Q Profit After Tax of About DKK260M
- TRYG DC : Tryg 2Q Gross Premiums Misses Estimates