Market movers today
Today’s calendar is thin at the global level. The spreading of the coronavirus will continue to be a key focus this week and if the number of cases outside Hubei continues to slow and the death rate remains low, we think the markets will increasingly focus on other things.
We have a few Scandi releases today. In Denmark, we are scheduled to receive December’s export figures and January’s consumer prices. Industry has driven much of the growth in exports this year, so the major slump in industrial production of 5.9% in December could very well have spilled over to the final export figures for 2019. We also get CPI numbers from Norway and Denmark. For Norway, we expect core inflation to have climbed from 1.8% y/y in December to 2.0% y/y in January and Danish CPI inflation to have declined to 0.4% from 0.8% in December.
Later this week, US retail sales on Friday will be one of the week’s most important releases. Also, the Riksbank will meet on Wednesday and Norges Bank governor Olsen will give his annual speech on Thursday.
Selected market news
In Ireland, Saturday’s general election resulted in the left-wing party Sinn Féin obtaining 24.5% of the popular vote, thus gaining a slightly better result than the two centre-right parties, Fine Gael (FG), the party of sitting prime minister Leo Varadkar, and Fianna Fáil (FF), standing at 20.9% and 22.2%, respectively. The election marks a ground-breaking result for both Sinn Féin, which last year obtained just 9.5% of the popular vote in local elections, and Ireland, which has been used to two-party rule, shifting between FF and FG for nearly a century. Following the results, Sinn Féin leader Mary Lou McDonald has demanded a role in a future government, despite both FG and FF saying before the election that they would seek to keep Sinn Féin out of a new coalition – comments that Leo Varadkar repeated on Sunday.
In China, businesses and factories in most provinces were initially set to re-open today, following a 10-day extension to the Lunar New Year holiday, put in place to contain the spreading of the coronavirus. However, according to the Financial Times, large companies such as Alibaba and Meituan will extend the holiday for at least another week, while city councils in Beijing and Shanghai have urged those who can to work from home, out of fear that re-opening too soon might cause the virus to spread again.
Bild am Sonntag yesterday reported that the leadership of the CDU, including Angela Merkel, wants Bodo Ramelow of die Linke to continue acting as prime minister of the state of Thuringia after newly appointed Thomas Kemmerich of the FDP resigned on Saturday. Kemmerich was only appointed on Wednesday, helped by a coalition of CDU and AfD, despite the leadership of the CDU being heavily against such an alliance. The crisis highlights the CDU’s fading grip on power in the former East Germany, where especially AfD has caved in to the mandates of established parties.
