The Hang Seng Index reversed its downward trend in Hong Kong on Thursday (February 12th), weakening by around 0.9% to around 27,000 after a strong session earlier. This decline halted the momentum of the short term rally, as investors began to reduce risk in large cap stocks. Among the index's contributors, Tencent was a major drag, with its shares falling by around 2.3%, putting pressure on the technology sector, which has recently been a driving force behind market gains. Weakness in large cap companies like this typically quickly impacts sentiment due to their significant weighting in...
The annual inflation rate in the UK rose to 3.6% in June 2025, the highest since January 2024, up from 3.4% in May and above expectations that it would remain unchanged. The main upward pressure came from transport prices, which increased by 1.7% (vs 0.7% in May), driven largely by motor fuel costs. Additional upward contributions came from airfares, particularly on long-haul and European routes, as well as rail fares and maintenance and repair of personal transport equipment. Clothing and footwear prices also rose (0.5% vs -0.3%) and food inflation climbed to 4.5%, the highest since...
The U.S. central bank will probably need to leave interest rates where they are for a while longer to ensure inflation stays low in the face of upward pressure from the Trump administration's tariffs, Dallas Federal Reserve Bank President Lorie Logan said on Tuesday. "My base case is that we'll need to keep interest rates modestly restrictive for some time to complete the work of returning inflation sustainably to the 2% target," Logan said in remarks prepared for delivery to the World Affairs Council of San Antonio. "It's also possible that some combination of softer inflation and a...
US President Donald Trump plans to impose tariffs of over 10% on smaller countries, including nations in Africa and the Caribbean, as the Associated Press reported. "We'll probably set one tariff for all of them," Trump told reporters on Tuesday. He added that it could be "a little over 10% tariff on goods from at least 100 nations." At the same time, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick said that the nations with goods being taxed at these rates would be in Africa and the Caribbean—places that generally do relatively modest levels of trade with the US and would be relatively insignificant...
President Donald Trump on Tuesday said the U.S. would impose a 19% tariff on goods from Indonesia under a new agreement with the Southeast Asian country and said more deals were in the works as he continued to press for what he views as better terms with trading partners and a path to reducing a massive U.S. trade deficit. The pact with the relatively minor U.S. trading partner is among the handful struck so far by the Trump administration ahead of an August 1 deadline for tariffs on most U.S. imports to rise again, and it came as the top U.S. trading partner - the European Union - readied...
U.S. consumer prices increased by the most in five months in June amid higher costs for some goods, suggesting tariffs were starting to have an impact on inflation and potentially keeping the Federal Reserve on the sidelines until September. Softening demand as consumers hunker down, however, is limiting price increases for services like airline fares and hotel and motel rooms, keeping underlying inflation muted for now. That trend, if sustained, could ease concerns of a broad-based rise in price pressures from tariffs. Nonetheless, economists generally expect the tariff-induced rise in...