Aurelia Butler

European stocks and US futures traded between gains and losses on Thursday, a day after minutes from the Federal Reserve’s December meeting revealed none of the central bank’s officials anticipated cutting interest rates this year.The regional Stoxx Europe 600 was steady by early afternoon, having earlier fallen 0.4 per cent, eating into a roughly 3 per cent gain this week. London’s FTSE 100 rose 0.4 per cent while France’s Cac 40 and Germany’s Dax were flat. Contracts tracking Wall Street’s benchmark S&P 500 and the tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 rose 0.1 per cent ahead of the New York open.The S&P 500 rose 13 per cent between mid-October and the start of December as inflation in the world’s biggest economy showed signs of slowing. The index has fallen about 5.5 per cent since then, however, on the back of hawkish comments from Fed officials, many of whom warned that price growth remained too high to justify lowering borrowing costs in 2023.Minutes from the Federal Open Market Committee’s most recent meeting crystallised those hints, dealing a blow to traders unconvinced that the Fed would hold interest rates at around 5 per cent to drag inflation back down to target. The latest minutes show “no participants anticipated that it would be appropriate to begin reducing the federal funds rate target in 2023”, with officials observing that “a restrictive policy stance would need to be maintained” until economic data “provided confidence that inflation was on a sustained downward path to 2 per cent, which was likely to take some time”.Lee Hardman, senior currency analyst at MUFG bank, said the comments, which were later reinforced by senior IMF official Gita Gopinath, “set a high hurdle for the Fed to pause [or] bring an end to their hiking cycle in the near-term”, though he noted that markets remained “sceptical that the Fed will have to raise rates above 5 per cent as planned”.A measure of the dollar’s strength against a basket of six peers was flat on the day, with the currency having weakened just over 7 per cent in the past three months. In Asia, Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index added a further 1.2 per cent, taking its gains since the start of November to about 43 per cent. “Given past divergence [with US indices] and positioning, there’s probably room for more gains,” said Mitul Kotecha, head of emerging markets strategy at TD Securities, “but with global equity markets stuttering amid earnings and growth worries, it is questionable how far the Hang Seng can deviate from the global trend”.China’s CSI 300 index of Shanghai- and Shenzhen-listed stocks added 1.9 per cent, having risen 13 per cent since the start of November, even as the country battles unprecedented outbreaks of Covid-19. More

NEW YORK (Reuters) – American technology firms dominated the number of announced job cuts in December, as some employers downsized workforces to brace for the prospect of difficult economic times looming ahead. According to the latest job cuts report from employment firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, Inc, released on Thursday, U.S.-based employers said they were cutting 43,651 jobs in the final month of 2022, down 43% from the number of cuts announced in November. The planned pace of layoffs in December was well above the 19,052 cuts announced in December 2021, the report said. For all of 2022, the report said there were 363,824 planned layoffs, up 13% from 2021. Tech companies, which have been facing rising challenges and withering stock prices, bore the brunt of the December planned job cuts, with 16,193. The report said that tech companies led announced job cuts for all of 2022, at 97,171 planned layoffs. That is up 649% from 2021. Layoffs are taking place in an economy where overall job growth has remained strong and unemployment, which stood at 3.7% in November, is at a historically low level. Against that strength, the Federal Reserve expects unemployment to rise in 2023 as it continues to raise short-term rates to lower some of the highest inflation pressures in decades. There are broad based fears the path the Fed is on will send the economy into recession. “The overall economy is still creating jobs, though employers appear to be actively planning for a downturn. Hiring has slowed as companies take a cautious approach entering 2023,” said Andrew Challenger, senior vice president at the employment firm. The government is set to report on December hiring levels on Friday. As that date approaches, there has been mixed news on the job market. On Wednesday, Salesforce (NYSE:CRM) Inc. said it planned to slash its workforce by 10%, citing a slowing economy. But in a government report on Wednesday, job openings, something that has been closely watched by the Fed, shrank by a lower than expected amount in November. More

Shoppers spent a record $211.7 billion online over the holiday season, which typically starts in November and ends in December, compared with an earlier forecast of $209.7 billion, the report showed on Thursday.While U.S. online holiday sales rose, it grew at the slowest pace as consumers felt the brunt of rising prices. “At a time when consumers were dealing with elevated prices in areas such as food, gas, and rent, holiday discounts were strong enough to sustain discretionary spending through the entire season,” said Vivek Pandya, lead analyst, Adobe Digital Insights.Companies ranging from Amazon.com Inc (NASDAQ:AMZN), Target Corp (NYSE:TGT), Walmart (NYSE:WMT) Inc to Best Buy Co Inc (NYSE:BBY) offered early discounts to spur demand and get rid of excess stock.Adobe Analytics, which measures e-commerce by tracking transactions at websites, has access to data covering purchases at 85% of the top 100 internet retailers in the United States.Majority of the discounts were for toys, where discounts peaked at 34% off listed price versus 19% last year, as well as electronics that saw discounts as high as 25% compared with 8% last year, according to the report.A big chunk of the holiday sales came during the Cyber Week – the five days between Thanksgiving and Cyber Monday – where consumers spent a total of $35.3 billion online, the report said. More

Shares in the company, which lost roughly 88% of their value in 2022, were down 40% in premarket trading.Total deposits from digital asset customers declined to $3.8 billion at the end of December 2022, compared with $11.9 billion at Sept. 30, 2022, the crypto-focused bank said in a preliminary earnings report.To maintain liquidity, the bank sold $5.2 billion of debt securities at a loss of $718 million in the fourth quarter.More than a trillion dollars in value was wiped out from the crypto sector last year with rising interest rates exacerbating worries of an economic downturn. The crash has eliminated key industry players such as crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital and crypto lender Celsius.After rapid growth in 2020 and 2021, bitcoin – the most popular digital currency by far – saw broad declines last year, pressuring the crypto industry globally. The biggest blow to the sector came after major crypto exchange FTX filed for bankruptcy protection in November. Its swift fall has sparked tough regulatory scrutiny of how crypto firms hold funds and conduct business operations.Silvergate has also been subject to regulatory scrutiny since the FTX crash, as lawmakers rush to create new rules for the largely unregulated crypto industry. The company had said earlier that it had no outstanding loans or investments in FTX, and that FTX was not a custodian for its bitcoin-collateralized Silvergate Exchange Network leverage loans.Founded in 1988, Silvergate ventured into crypto in 2013. The La Jolla, California-based bank counts major exchanges like Coinbase (NASDAQ:COIN) Global Inc and Kraken among its customers. More