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Good morning, and welcome to Week 48. The ASX 200 is expected to open down 0.45% as global trading slows through the U.S. break – a trend retail shoppers will shrug off this weekend as Black Friday sales begin in earnest.
With Wall Street shut for Thanksgiving, investors watched (but don’t look to be following) how Europe moved; the continent-wide STOXX 600 index rose 0.5% overnight.
U.S. futures have still been ticking through the closure too, with the S&P 500 up 0.2%.
Back home, Reserve Bank boss Michele Bullock has warned rate reductions definitely won’t be considered in the near term; she told a CEDA event on Thursday evening the booming job market in Australia is still pushing inflation higher.
The idea is as long as unemployment is still relatively low – and it’s at 4.1% right now – then the RBA doesn’t have a real mandate to respond in any major way.
Bullock’s hawkish outlook does seem to confirm cuts won’t come until May at earliest.
(This stance continues to come at odds with other countries, like South Korea where its central bank just trimmed rates by 25bps to 3.0% even under trade concerns.)
The RBA governor’s latest suggestions came at nearly the same time as Treasurer Jim Chalmers struck a deal with the Greens and Senate crossbenchers to make sweeping changes to the central bank. The RBA is now expected to split into separate committees for interest rate setting and governance by March.
In the same marathon Senate session, strict new legislation around under-16s using social media was also passed. It will now take at least 12 months to come into effect.
Elsewhere, Cbus chairman Wayne Swan will face parliamentary questioning over 10,000 death and disability insurance claims that were delayed by a year or more.
Some HotCopper users have already taken major interest in news from Ampol Limited (ASX:ALD) – which has completed repairs on its Lytton refinery’s Fluidised Catalytic Cracking Unit – and Warriedar Resources (ASX:WA8) this morning.
Resource Development Group’s (ASX:RDG) tonnage increase at its Ant Hill Manganese Project is also being closely poured over before the day’s trade.
Paladin Energy (ASX:PDN) and Scentre Group (ASX:SCG) have AGMs.
Looking at forex, the Aussie dollar is buying 65 US cents.
To commodities, which are in the greenback,
Iron Ore has kept climbing to end the week, to $102.17 a tonne in Singapore,
Brent Crude is trading at $73.05,
Gold is trading at $2,638 per ounce, and,
US natgas futures are at $3.29 per gigajoule.
That’s Market Open, I’m Isaac McIntyre, stick with us for HotCopper’s Market Update.
