Aurelia Butler

Investing.com — The Labor Department releases its Job Openings survey for February, a day after the ISM’s manufacturing survey prompted fresh hopes of an early Fed pivot. Donald Trump is set to be arraigned in New York, as his main rival for the Republican nomination next year gets a tongue-lashing from Walt Disney CEO Robert Iger. Oil extends its gains after the surprise output quota cut by OPEC at the weekend. Here’s what’s moving markets on Tuesday, April 4th.1. JOLTS survey to show test of labor market strengthA week full of labor market data kicks off with the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey at 10:00 ET (14:00 GMT), a day after a weak ISM survey stoked hopes of a quick pivot from the Federal Reserve.Job vacancies across the country are expected to have fallen for a second straight month, although it’s worth noting that consensus forecasts have been on the low side for five months in a row. Some analysts argue that the JOLTS is overstating the strength of hiring, given that it only extrapolates from data on externally advertised jobs, which appear to account for more of total job vacancies today than they did before the pandemic.On Monday, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook had highlighted the strength of the labor market in arguing for at least one more interest rate hike. A lower-than-expected number may cause that narrative to come into question. Cook speaks again on Tuesday, at 13:30 ET. Boston Fed President Susan Collins speaks a quarter of an hour later, and Cleveland’s Loretta Mester speaks at 19:45 ET.2. Disney boss ratchets up dispute with DeSantis as Trump faces arraignmentWalt Disney (NYSE:DIS) CEO Robert Iger blasted Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’ actions to crack down on its privileged status in the state as “anti-business” and – in what appeared to be a veiled threat to scale down investment in the state – “anti-Florida”.DeSantis’ running battle with Disney over a controversial law banning the teaching of gender and sexuality-related issues in state classrooms is widely seen as a key part of the governor’s positioning ahead of the race for the Republican Party presidential nomination next year, allowing him to present himself as a scourge of ‘woke’ culture and over-mighty corporations.His biggest rival for the nomination, former President Donald Trump, is set to be arraigned in New York today on charges relating to hush-money payments made to a porn star during the 2016 election campaign.3. Stocks set to open flat; CS shareholder meeting in focus; FTC bares its teethU.S. stocks are set to drift at the open, with most market participants apparently more interested in the political-criminal drama expected to unfold in New York later.By 05:10 ET (09:10 GMT), Dow Jones futures were effectively unchanged, as were S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq 100 futures. All three cash indices had gained on Monday after the ISM manufacturing PMI, a key gauge of economic activity, fell to its lowest in nearly two years.Stocks likely to be in focus later include UBS (NYSE:UBS), against the backdrop of Credit Suisse’s (NYSE:CS) last-ever annual shareholder meeting, and French skincare giant L’Oréal (EPA:OREP), which announced its biggest acquisition in years overnight with a $2.5 billion deal for Australian-based Aesop.Also in focus will be Illumina (NASDAQ:ILMN), after the Federal Trade Commission struck down its proposed deal to buy cancer diagnostic group Grail for $7 billion4. Australia pauses hikes; brighter news from GermanyThe Australian central bank halted a policy tightening cycle that had lasted nearly a year, leaving its cash rate unchanged at 3.60%. The Aussie was the weakest of the major currencies in overnight trading as a result. But the RBA left the door open to resuming rate hikes in the future if the current bout of financial market volatility blows over.In Europe, meanwhile, German trade data for February suggested that Europe’s traditional growth engine was getting back into gear. Exports and imports both posted solid growth of around 4% from January. Newswires also reported that Germany’s six leading economic think tanks will upgrade their estimates for gross domestic product this year to growth of 0.3%, from a contraction of 0.4% in their last report.Elsewhere, euro zone producer prices fell 0.5% in February, more than expected, as last year’s energy spike continued to unwind.5. Oil extends gains ahead of API updateCrude oil prices extended their gains in the wake of OPEC’s surprise decision at the weekend to cut output quotas by over 1 million barrels a day.By 05:25 ET, U.S. crude futures were back at nearly $81 a barrel, up 0.6% on the day. Brent futures were up 0.5% at $85.36 a barrel. Market participants have been betting that the expected growth in Chinese demand over the year will more than offset a slowdown in Western demand, a bet supported by the day’s data out of Germany.That thesis faces its next test at 16:30 ET, when the American Petroleum Institute reports weekly inventory data for last week. More

Good morning. Here at Unhedged our main project for the rest of this week is ignoring the indictment of a second-tier real estate developer from Florida. But that should leave us with a few other things to write about. Email us your ideas: [email protected] and [email protected]. Opec flexes, markets unimpressedOil rose more than 6 per cent, to $85, yesterday. This was in response Opec’s announcement, over the weekend, that Saudi Arabia would cut its production by 5 per cent, and that members of the Opec+ cartel would follow with cuts of their own. The move was rich with political implications. Many analysts argue it marks a strategic change by the Saudis and their allies, rather than a tactical move to defend a weak oil price. From the FT:“It’s a Saudi-first policy. They’re making new friends, as we saw with China,” [Helima Croft, of RBC Capital Markets] said, referring to a recent Beijing-brokered diplomatic deal between Saudi Arabia and Iran. The kingdom was sending a message to the US that “it’s no longer a unipolar world”.This sounds like serious stuff to us. So we were struck by how little markets responded on Monday. Stocks leveraged to oil, from upstream production to oilfield services, popped. But given that sustained higher oil prices are stagflationary, we were a bit surprised to see gains across a variety of other sectors (healthcare, materials, staples). More surprising still, the policy-sensitive two-year bond yield fell nine basis points. This is particularly notable given that Opec+ has a historically high level of control over oil prices right now, as Goldman Sachs’s Daan Struyven has argued. The addition of the “+” countries (Russia, Kazakhstan, Mexico et al) to the cartel have increased its market share. Greater financial discipline from non-Opec producers, particularly the US, has reduced the price elasticity of global supply. And global demand has become more inelastic because (among other reasons) transportation fuel, which has few substitutes, now makes up a greater share of total demand. If Opec+ wants play for sustained higher oil prices, it is holding good cards.Furthermore, as our colleague Derek Brower of FT Energy Source pointed out to us, many analysts were already pointing out that oil was positioned for a rally in the second half of 2023, as resurgent demand from China pushed the market into deficit. Struyven, for example, has been saying for months that oil would pass $100 by year-end. Even if higher oil is not enough to change the growth outlook materially, we would expect some worry about the inflationary effects, given the market’s monomaniacal focus on Federal Reserve policy. Energy is 7 per cent of CPI, and has a powerful impact even on core (ex-food and energy) CPI through transportation services, which has been a crucial swing factor in the inflation measures the Fed cares about most.So why the indifference? Once again, it looks to us like the soft landing scenario is exercising a hypnotic effect on the market. If you think there is a real threat the economy will keep running too hot, the additional inflationary effects of high oil prices are an unwelcome additional risk. If you think the central forecast is for demand softening enough to bring down inflation, then sustained higher oil prices don’t seem that much of a threat.For example, here is Capital Economics’ Adam Hoyes:The [initial] moves in the bond market [with inflation breakevens rising following the Opec + announcement] have more than reversed since the release of the March ISM Manufacturing survey, where the headline index slumped to a new cyclical low and other indices pointed to a further easing in price pressures. We wouldn’t be surprised if this pattern — higher oil prices but lower Treasury yields — continued over the rest of this year, even though they’ve often moved together. Admittedly, we do think oil demand is set to be weak over the rest of this year, with growth in many major economies likely to be sluggish at best.Hoyes, and various other analysts who struck similar notes, may very well be right. Our point is just that there is part of the probability distribution (20 per cent of it?) where the labour market stays too tight, and economy does not cool materially, and the Fed has to keep rates high. In that tail of the curve, higher oil prices could be a real problem.Bitcoin’s new old narrativeBitcoin’s 70 per cent ascent this year happened in two stages. The first was the flight-to-shite that began the year, as dreams of a soft landing and lower interest rates set off a rally in all manner of high-duration junk. The second was the fallout from Silicon Valley Bank’s collapse. As bond yields fell, bitcoin’s price popped. Flows into crypto investment products are at their highest since mid-2022, according to CoinShares. After a run of eerily stable price action in the second half of last year, this is a big change. A rally amid a banking panic is catnip for bitcoiners. And the new crypto story is the same old crypto story: people are fast losing confidence in banks and are flocking to bitcoin.Here, for example, is Balaji Srinivasan, formerly a top figure at Coinbase and Andreesen Horowitz, spinning a yarn last month about why a “stealth financial crisis” is poised to bring about hyperinflation and mass bitcoin adoption. He claims to have bet $1mn this will happen by June:The central banks, the banks, and the banking regulators all knew a huge crash was coming — the phrase is “unrealised losses”. But they never notified you, the depositor . . . It’s Uncle Sam Bankman-Fried. Just like SBF used your deposits to buy shitcoins, using accounting tricks to fool himself and others into using the money, so too did the banks . . . They all used the deposits to buy the ultimate shitcoin: long-dated US Treasuries. And they all got [wrecked] at the same time, in the same way, because they bought the same asset from the same vendor who devalued it at the same time: the Fed . . . So anyone who bet on long-term Treasuries got killed in 2021. And now, anyone who bets on short-term Treasuries is going to get killed in 2023. The absolute worst place you can be is to have large amounts of assets locked up in three-month treasury bills. The ~5 per cent interest rate offered by big banks (G-SIBs) is a trap. Most fiat bank accounts are now a trap, for those countries whose central bankers followed the Fed . . . This is the moment that the world redenominates on Bitcoin as digital gold, returning to a model much like before the 20th century.This is a bit loony (what is the worst-case scenario for three-month Treasuries yielding 4.6 per cent?), though first chunk of Srinivasan’s story is legible. Whether banks should’ve accounted for mark-to-market losses on long-dated securities is a live debate. But we can’t make the leap from “long-term Treasuries got killed” to “the world is about to drop fiat currency”. There’s a more credible story for bitcoin’s bumper quarter: liquidity. Daniel Clifton at Strategas calculates that US policymakers, on net, injected $755bn in liquidity in the first quarter of this year, whereas they were net subtracters of liquidity all through last year. The correlation between changes in liquidity and bitcoin’s price looks tight:

Why should liquidity injections help bitcoin? We liked this illustration from Citi strategist Matt King, on Bloomberg’s Odd Lots podcast last week, of how investors get crowded into riskier assets:For me, it’s really about this balance between how much money the private sector has relative to how many assets are available to absorb that money . . . You can’t see all these moving parts, but what I think goes on is that the guy who would’ve bought bills buys bonds, the guy who would’ve bought bonds buys IG credit, the guy who would’ve bought IG buys high-yield, and so on . . . The best correlations [with central bank liquidity injections] I find of all are exactly with the most popular assets like cryptocurrency or Tesla stock.In this sense the banking crisis, in forcing a new round of liquidity support, really has helped bitcoin beyond the narrative boost, though not for the reasons Srinivasan suggests. Systemic stresses lift bitcoin not because they discredit the financial system, but because the regulatory responses are good for speculators. (Ethan Wu)One good readSome fascinating hedge fund sniping: Derek Kaufman (former Citadel), Boaz Weinstein (Saba Capital) and Cliff Asness (AQR) don’t like how Mark Spitznagel (Universa) calculates his returns. More

All eyes will be on New York today as Donald Trump becomes the first sitting or former US president to face criminal charges.He spent the night at Trump Tower on New York’s Fifth Avenue speaking with legal advisers ahead of the Manhattan court appearance later today.Authorities in New York are braced for protests and possible violence. Barricades have been erected outside the New York County Criminal Courthouse in Lower Manhattan to avoid any disruption to legal proceedings.The former president, who is favourite to be the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, will attend the hearing where the charges will be read out and he will enter a plea of not guilty “very loudly and proudly”, his lawyer Joe Tacopina said on CNN on Sunday. The charges remain under seal but relate to hush money allegedly paid to porn star Stormy Daniels before the 2016 election. It is claimed the $130,000 was paid to Daniels via attorney Michael Cohen to cover up an affair she claimed to have had with Trump years earlier.The transactions were allegedly recorded as legal fees, and prosecutors will attempt to show that they were in fact made to protect Trump’s campaign, according to people familiar with the case, and therefore violated federal campaign finance law.After the arraignment, which is expected to last no longer than 30 minutes, Trump will fly back to Florida where he is expected to give a speech to supporters at his Mar-a-Lago mansion this evening.To prepare for the hearing here are some articles I recommend you read:The legal drama: The historic indictment is the culmination of a four-year investigation. Josh Chaffin lists the key characters.The lawyers: Once criminal proceedings begin the spectacle will move from the airwaves to the courtroom and spotlight will fall on two legal heavyweights of the criminal bar. The next steps: Matters of fact and law in People vs Trump will be argued over several months before a trial can even be considered. Here’s what to watch for in the weeks to come.Here’s what else I’m keeping tabs on today:Economic data: We get job openings data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and, separately, the latest on US manufacturing activity. Canada releases details of its February trade balance. Chicago votes for a new mayor: The race is between progressive Democrat Brandon Johnson and establishment favourite Paul Vallas.Nato: It’s a historic day for the western military alliance as it officially welcomes Finland, its 31st member, in a ceremony to be attended by US secretary of state Antony Blinken.As always, thank you for reading FirstFT and let us know if you have any feedback at [email protected]. Five more top stories

Emmanuel Macron and Ursula von der Leyen met in Paris ahead of their joint trip to Beijing © Nathan Laine/Bloomberg

1. Beijing should play a “constructive” role in influencing Russia to rein in its war, European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen told the FT ahead of her visit to China with France’s Emmanuel Macron. Here’s what the two leaders hope to accomplish when they meet Xi Jinping.2. Credit Suisse chair Axel Lehmann apologised to investors for the collapse of the 167-year-old Swiss bank at its final shareholder meeting as an independent business this morning. “It is a sad day. For all of you, and for us,” Lehmann told shareholders.3. JPMorgan Chase executives allegedly joked about Jeffrey Epstein’s interest in young girls while the disgraced financier was a client of the US banking giant, lawyers for the US Virgin Islands have claimed. Read more from yesterday’s new court filing. 4. Clients asked to pull $4.5bn from the Blackstone Real Estate Income Trust, or Breit, in March, a 15 per cent increase in the level of requests from the previous month. The withdrawal requests came in even as Blackstone executives were promoting investment opportunities in the sector.5. Ari Emanuel’s Endeavor Group has agreed to merge its Ultimate Fighting Championship with World Wrestling Entertainment, forming a new listed entity with an enterprise value of $21.4bn. Under the all-stock deal, Endeavor will own 51 per cent of the new business and WWE shareholders will retain the remaining 49 per cent, the companies announced yesterday.The Big Read

© Paul McErlane/FT

Next week, Northern Ireland will celebrate 25 years since the Good Friday Agreement. But while the Irish Republican Army has given up its long war to oust British rule, loyalist paramilitaries still intimidate and coerce people with “kneecappings” and some communities are beset by drugs and debt.We’re also reading . . . Chatbot showdown: How does GPT-4 stack up against Bard? We asked the generative AI systems to pick stocks, tell jokes and imagine the Xi-Putin summit.Hedge funds: Many have been left in the red for the year following the sharp moves against them in the US government bond market.Spanish success: The poster child for precarious work, Spain’s efforts to boost permanent employment are working remarkably well, writes Sarah O’Connor.Chart of the dayThe European Central Bank has called for a clampdown on commercial property funds to tackle the risk that a downturn in the €1tn sector could trigger a liquidity crisis if investors rushed to withdraw their money.Take a break from the newsAsk business or political leaders in Copenhagen for lunch, and they will invariably suggest smørrebrød. But ask them for dinner, and the options will be much more varied. Here’s FT Globetrotter’s insider guide to the top five restaurants favoured by the city’s movers and shakers.

Head to Bistro Boheme for classic French staples © Stine Christiansen

Additional contributions by Tee Zhuo and Emily Goldberg More

Europe’s workers are famously well-protected by rights and regulations, but the continent’s dirty secret is that they don’t extend to everyone. Countries such as France, Spain, Italy and Portugal have long had insulated insiders who are hard to fire and insecure outsiders who churn from one temporary contract to the next. Inevitably, the young have been most likely to get stuck on the outside: 37 per cent of the eurozone’s under-30s workers are on temporary contracts. But now Spain — the poster child for precarious work — is trying to put a stop to all that. And so far, its efforts look remarkably successful.Europe’s insider-outsider labour markets date back to reforms in the 1980s, 1990s and 2000s which made it easier for employers to use flexible contracts, but kept strict protections for people in permanent jobs. Temp jobs aren’t inherently problematic. Employers clearly need some flexibility for seasonal ups and downs and other unplanned events. They can also help young people and jobseekers to get a first foothold in the world of work. But when they become too widespread, they can become more like traps than stepping stones, leaving the young going from one fixed-term contract to the next without access to decent training which would boost productivity. By 2018, the OECD had concluded that widespread temporary work “tends to have only a limited impact on improving employment opportunities for disadvantaged groups” and comes at “the expense of permanent employment, reducing job quality, slowing the transition of temporary to permanent work and reinforcing long-term inequalities in the labour market”. Nowhere was this more evident than Spain, where the proportion of under-30s on temporary contracts has been above 50 per cent for most of the past decade. Until last year, that is, when Spain’s leftwing government set out to “recover workers’ rights without hurting business” in a deal it thrashed out with employers and trade unions. The new rules, which began in 2022, aimed to put a stop to the use of back-to-back temporary contracts and make new permanent jobs the rule rather than the exception. A new “open-ended contract for intermittent work” was introduced for employers in seasonal sectors, under which staff would remain linked to the company when the season ended and called back when demand resumed.Jorge Uxó, an economics professor at Complutense University of Madrid, told me the impact of the reform has been “extraordinarily positive” so far. The share of employees on temporary contracts fell from 26 per cent in 2021 to 18 per cent by the end of last year, not far off the eurozone average of 14.6 per cent. For the under-30s, the rate fell from 58 per cent in 2021 to 39 per cent.

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This hasn’t happened through the mass dismissal of temporary workers — as was the case after the 2009 crash — but rather at a time of overall job creation. Between the fourth quarter of 2021 and the fourth quarter of 2022, the number of workers on temporary contracts fell by 1.2mn, while the number of workers on permanent contracts rose by 1.6mn. This should be good for the wider economy, too. Research by the Bank of Spain shows people on temporary contracts in Spain tend to spend a smaller share of their income than people on permanent ones. The rise in the number of workers in stable jobs should help to boost household spending, the central bank said.There are some caveats. It could be argued the new “intermittent open-ended” contracts are not much better than temporary contracts, since people on them still don’t have secure incomes. Against that, Uxó and other economists say they do confer more rights on workers and only account for a minority of the new permanent contracts anyway.The bigger question is what comes next. Spain still has a pretty high share of temporary work and the reforms haven’t been tested yet in a downturn. It is also too soon to know whether they will boost training and productivity in the longer term. Rafael Doménech, head of economic analysis at the bank BBVA, says the “balance is positive” so far and demonstrates “the flexibility and capability of firms to adapt” to new rules. “But there are many other aspects where the jury is still out.”Nonetheless, there is perhaps a bigger lesson here. Over the past decade, it has become fashionable to see rising insecurity as a natural consequence of the shifts in 21st-century work. But in Spain, at least, it turns out it wasn’t an economic inevitability to which policymakers had to adapt. It was just a problem they had to [email protected] More

(Reuters) – A look at the day ahead in Asian markets from Jamie McGeever.Australia’s central bank takes center stage on Tuesday with its latest interest rate decision, and beyond that, if the second trading day of the quarter is as eventful as the first, then investors’ plates will be extra full.Oil prices posted the biggest rise in a year on Monday following a surprise output cut from OPEC+ over the weekend, a slump in U.S. bond yields in the wake of recession-level manufacturing sector data and a steep slide in Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) shares after sluggish sales growth figures.Wall Street took the ‘bad news is good news’ position on that, however: lower yields and implied interest rates, coupled with buoyant energy stocks, ensured the Dow and S&P 500 closed in the green – the Dow rising 1%.Tesla’s 6% slump dragged the Nasdaq into the red, but the broader index’s decline was still only 0.27%.Not only did U.S. manufacturing activity in March shrink at its fastest pace in nearly three years, all components of the Institute for Supply Management’s survey fell below the 50 growth/contraction threshold for the first time since 2009.The renewed fall in U.S. Treasury yields – they fell five to ten basis points across the curve on Monday – continued to weigh on the dollar.The biggest gainer on the greenback was the Australian dollar – up 1.5% for its best day in three months – ahead of the Reserve Bank of Australia’s policy decision on Tuesday. Graphic: Australian dollar – daily change – https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/mkt/zjvqjnxwjpx/RBA.jpgGraphic: Australian interest rates and inflation – https://fingfx.thomsonreuters.com/gfx/mkt/xmvjkbzrlpr/AUD.png Interest rate futures markets are attaching a near-90% probability to policymakers keeping the benchmark cash rate unchanged at 3.60%, putting the year-long hiking cycle on hold at least for now.Economists polled by Reuters are not quite as convinced – 21 of 37 are forecasting a 25 basis point increase to 3.85%, and the remaining 14 are going for a pause.Elsewhere in Asia on Tuesday, South Korea releases inflation figures for March. Economists polled by Reuters expect monthly and annual inflation rates to slow.Japan’s monetary base has exploded beyond all recognition in recent years thanks to significant monetary stimulus and injections of liquidity into the financial system from the Bank of Japan, so the monthly figures rarely draw much attention.That might change with the March numbers on Tuesday though, in light of U.S. figures last week that showed U.S. money supply falling at its fastest rate since the 1930s.Japan’s monetary base has actually been shrinking every month since September, on a year-on-year basis.Here are three key developments that could provide more direction to markets on Tuesday:- Australia interest rate decision- South Korea inflation (March)- Japan monetary base (March) (By Jamie McGeever; Editing by Josie Kao) More

MANILA (Reuters) – Developing Asia will grow faster than previously thought this year, underpinned by a stronger-than-projected rebound in China, but risks from global banking turmoil could weigh on the outlook, the Asian Development Bank (ADB) said on Tuesday.Developing Asia, which groups together 46 economies in the Asia-Pacific, is forecast to grow 4.8% in 2023, the ADB said in its Asian Development Outlook report, more than its previous estimate of 4.6% in December, and following 4.2% growth in 2022.Driving the region’s growth this year is China’s recovery after it ended its zero-COVID policy in December, with the world’s second-biggest economy seen expanding 5.0% this year, the ADB said, above its earlier estimate of 4.3%.China’s reopening “is really going to create the strongest kind of support for growth in the region this year,” ADB Chief Economist Albert Park told Reuters.And while China’s embattled property sector “remains a point of concern”, Park said the upside risks to China’s growth outlook outweigh downside risks.”If life really returns to normal quickly and confidence comes back, growth could even be higher than 5% which would be obviously even better for the region,” Park said. Excluding China, the region is expected to grow 4.6% this year, slower than the previous year’s 5.4% pace. By subregion, South Asia is expected to record the fastest expansion of 5.5% this year, buoyed by India’s projected growth of 6.4% this year, followed by Southeast Asia, which is forecast to grow 4.7% this year.Even as growth in developing Asia gathers pace, the ADB warned challenges remain, including turbulence in the global banking sector and an escalation in the Ukraine war, which could cause a surge in commodity prices.But for now, turmoil in the global banking sector, triggered by the collapse of two mid-sized U.S. lenders, will not turn into “a bigger crisis of the financial system in the U.S.”, Park said even as he urged policymakers to stay vigilant.Working in the region’s favour is the expected easing in inflation, which would reduce the need for frequent and sizeable interest rate hikes that could dampen consumption. From 4.4% in 2022, inflation is forecast to decelerate to 4.2% this year and 3.3% next year, the ADB said, but it warned that core inflation remained high in some economies and required close monitoring.In a separate media briefing, Park said a surprise announcement by OPEC+ to cut production introduces another challenge for the region as this could drive oil prices higher. Currently, the ADB forecasts oil prices to average $88 a barrel this year and $90 next year. GDP GROWTH 2021 2022 2023 2023 2024 DEC APR APR Caucasus and 5.8 5.1 4.2 4.4 4.6 Central Asia East Asia 7.9 2.8 4.0 4.6 4.2 China 8.4 3.0 4.3 5.0 4.5 South Asia 8.4 6.4 6.3 5.5 6.1 India 9.1 6.8 7.2 6.4 6.7 Southeast Asia 3.5 5.6 4.7 4.7 5.0 Indonesia 3.7 5.3 4.8 4.8 5.0 Malaysia 3.1 8.7 4.3 4.7 4.9 Myanmar -5.9 2.0 n/a 2.8 3.2 Philippines 5.7 7.6 6.0 6.0 6.2 Singapore 8.9 3.6 2.3 2.0 3.0 Thailand 1.5 2.6 4.0 3.3 3.7 Vietnam 2.6 8.0 6.3 6.5 6.8 The Pacific -1.4 5.2 4.8 3.3 2.8 Developing Asia 7.2 4.2 4.6 4.8 4.8 INFLATION DEC APR APR Central Asia 9.0 12.9 8.5 10.3 7.5 East Asia 1.1 2.3 2.4 2.3 2.0 China 0.9 2.0 2.3 2.2 2.0 South Asia 5.8 8.2 7.9 8.1 5.8 India 5.5 6.7 5.8 5.0 4.5 Southeast Asia 2.0 5.0 4.5 4.4 3.3 Indonesia 1.6 4.2 5.0 4.2 3.0 Malaysia 2.5 3.4 3.0 3.1 2.8 Myanmar 3.6 16.0 n/a 10.5 8.2 Philippines 3.9 5.8 4.3 6.2 4.0 Singapore 2.3 6.1 5.5 5.0 2.0 Thailand 1.2 6.1 2.7 2.9 2.3 Vietnam 1.8 3.2 4.5 4.5 4.2 The Pacific 3.1 5.7 5.0 5.0 4.4 Developing Asia 2.6 4.4 4.2 4.2 3.3 More