Economy

Authorities in Chaoyang, home to 3.45 million people, late on Sunday ordered residents and those who work there to be tested three times this week as Beijing warned the virus had “stealthily” spread in the city for about a week before being detected. “I’m preparing for the worst,” said a graduate student in the nearby Haidian district surnamed Zhang, who placed online orders for dozens of snacks and 10 pounds of apples.Shoppers in the city crowded stores and online platforms to stock up on leafy vegetables, fresh meat, instant noodles and rolls of toilet paper.In Shanghai, where most of its 25 million residents have been locked down for weeks, the main food supply bottleneck has been the lack of enough couriers to make deliveries to homes, fuelling anger among residents.In Beijing, supermarket chains including Carrefour (EPA:CARR) and Wumart said they had more than doubled inventories, while Meituan’s grocery-focused e-commerce platform increased stocks and the number of staffers for sorting and delivery, according to the state-backed Beijing Daily.Supermarket chains should ensure that goods were being replenished in time, said a Beijing official at a news conference late in the day, adding that the city’s reserves of refined grains and oil could meet the consumption needs of residents for 30 days. The operating hours of stores would also be extended, the official said. Since Friday, Beijing has reported 70 locally transmitted cases in eight of its 16 districts, with Chaoyang accounting for 46 of the total, said a local health official on Monday.Even in districts such as Haidian that have yet to report any cases in the current outbreak, there is a sense of growing unease over food supply. AREAS UNDER LOCKDOWNWhile the Chinese capital’s caseload is small compared with those globally and the hundreds of thousands in Shanghai, Chaoyang district told residents to reduce public activities, although most schools, stores and offices remained open.Chinese shares tumbled on Monday, with the blue-chip CSI300 index closing down 4.9% at a two-year low, weighed by worries Beijing was on the verge of joining Shanghai in lockdowns. [L2N2WN0GK]The Shanghai Composite Index slumped 5.1%. Beijing’s Chaoyang district is home to many wealthy residents, most foreign embassies as well as entertainment venues and corporate headquarters. It has little manufacturing.”The current outbreak in Beijing is spreading stealthily from sources that remained unknown yet and is developing rapidly,” a municipality official said on Sunday. More than a dozen buildings in Chaoyang have been put under lockdown. For the rest of the district, people were to be tested on Monday and again on Wednesday and Friday.On Monday morning, people queued at makeshift testing sites manned by medical workers in protective suits. Under mass testing campaigns in China, multiple samples are tested together. “I came as the notice suggested, at 6 a.m., for testing just to make sure that I can get to work on time,” said a man in his 30s queuing for a test in his residential compound. By the early afternoon, movement restrictions in one part of Chaoyang were tightened, with residents told not to leave the area at all and not to leave their local compounds for non-essential reasons, state television reported. More

Palm oil prices shot higher and the Indonesian rupiah lost ground on Monday after Jakarta levied a blanket ban on exports of the edible oil in a bid to contain surging food prices as a result of the war in Ukraine.The move by Indonesia, the world’s biggest exporter of palm oil, is the latest food export ban being implemented by countries around the world suffering from soaring food prices. “This is yet another reminder of the vulnerability present across agricultural supply chains in an environment of already historically tight inventories, compounded by the indefinite loss of Ukrainian export volumes and historically high production costs,” said Tracey Allen, a JPMorgan analyst in London.Agricultural commodity prices have jumped after exports from Ukraine, a leading grain and sunflower oil supplier to world markets, stopped due to the war.Benchmark wheat prices in Chicago have risen 21 per cent while corn has added 15 per cent, leading to higher food import bills for countries reliant on international markets for their grains.Vegetable oil prices have also shot up, with retailers in many countries starting to ration supplies. The UN Food and Agricultural Organization’s vegetable oil price index has surged 40 per cent this year.The tight vegetable oil market has forced retailers to start rationing cooking oil. Supermarkets in some European countries last month started limiting the amount of cooking oil customers can buy, while leading UK retailers such as Tesco and Waitrose followed suit over the past few days.Indonesian president Joko Widodo announced a total ban for outbound shipments of the oil on Friday. As markets reopened on Monday, palm oil traded in Malaysia jumped as much as 7 per cent to 6,800 ringgit a tonne before falling back to 6,217 ringgit.The Indonesian rupiah, which has been largely stable this year despite pressure on emerging markets from anticipated US rate rises, also dropped 0.7 per cent to 14,455 per dollar, marking the sharpest daily fall in half a year.Although the restrictions would probably bring down prices in Indonesia, they would drive up prices for importers, including India and China, said one analyst. “Clearly this is a negative for the global consumer.”The ban also spurred a sell-off for Indonesian palm oil producers, with Jakarta-listed Triputra Agro Persada falling about 7 per cent and rival Astra Agro Lestari down more than 4 per cent.Indonesia was already struggling with a domestic palm oil shortage before the invasion of Ukraine, piling pressure on the government to act as the world’s largest Muslim population prepares for feasting during the Eid al-Fitr holiday, known locally as Lebaran. Earlier this month, students took to the streets to protest rising inflation, as well as rumours that Jokowi, as the president is popularly known, would seek a third term.The export ban, which will take effect on Thursday, marks the latest protectionist move by Jokowi’s government, which had already introduced requirements that producers devote a portion of output to domestic markets and recently raised Indonesia’s palm export levy.Analysts said the new restrictions had been introduced ahead of Lebaran holiday in early May. “We believe the suspension would be lifted soon after the passing of the Lebaran festive period, as consumption demand is set to normalise thereafter,” said Lester Siew, an analyst at Citigroup.Additional reporting by Neil Hume in London More

And breathe. In the end it was a convincing victory by Emmanuel Macron against Marine Le Pen in yesterday’s French presidential election. Le Pen has moderated her positions a lot over the years (no more leaving the euro or indeed the EU, for example) yet still lost heavily. Today’s main piece sketches out what the result is likely to mean, given the influence of France on EU trade policy. Charted waters looks at what can be gleaned about the impact of the Ukraine conflict from last week’s unusually testy IMF meeting.We’ll always have ParisThe biggest laugh of the campaign for trade folks, admittedly in a contest that’s been short on globalisation-related giggles, was Le Pen’s assertion in last week’s head-to-head debate that Macron hadn’t stood up for French interests inside the EU and was too lax about allowing imports. That must have provoked hollow mirth from the Atlantic to the Black Sea and the Baltic to the Adriatic. France has always thrown its weight around in EU debates in general and trade in particular. With the UK gone, the influence of its instinctive interventionism has become increasingly clear.There’s the European Chips Act, driven through by hyperactive French internal markets commissioner Thierry Breton, which hurls money at the EU semiconductor industry in a revival of old-school industrial policy. There’s the carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM), which threatens to block imports from relatively emissions-intensive producers. There’s the proposed “mirror clauses” which aim to force trading partners to adopt EU farming standards in order to be able to export to Europe. And most of all there’s the “anti-coercion instrument”, which will authorise the EU to block imports, procurement bids, inward investment and so on from countries whose governments try to bully the union or its member states. All bear the imprint of Paris, and all have raised concerns among more liberal-minded countries within the EU.Macron was evidently aware of some vulnerabilities to Le Pen’s charges and her assertion that France should drop its focus on the EU and seek to be a global power, working especially with former colonies in Africa. (Similar claims made by Brexiters about always losing battles in the EU were also largely wrong, and yet they and the Global Britain vision carried the day in the referendum.)The president had pretty solid answers ready to Le Pen’s accusations that the posted workers scheme for cross-border EU staff undercuts French labour standards (it’s been reformed), that trade deals cause environmental degradation (he’s stalled the Mercosur agreement because of Amazon deforestation) and that imports weaken farming standards (he specifically mentioned the mirror clauses).France holds the six-month rotating presidency of the EU council of member states, and Macron has used the opportunity to push through a bare-bones version of the CBAM earlier this year to have something to show by election time. He has also tried to neutralise accusations of betraying French farmers by putting bilateral trade deals with New Zealand and Australia on hold for the course of the presidency. This came sufficiently late in the process that the Kiwi prime minister Jacinda Ardern had to cancel a planned trip to Brussels rather than turn up and go away again empty-handed. So, a prepared defence and a bit of political manoeuvring to create some good optics. I’m no more a psephological expert on France than I could advise on New Zealand cattle farming: analysing the idiosyncrasies of French politics is strictly one for the pros. But I’d be surprised if trade shifted many votes from Macron to Le Pen, as opposed to more domestic concerns such as inflation and living standards. The hard right in France and elsewhere are often less rabid economic anti-globalisers than cultural nativists. (I’ll come back to this issue in subsequent Trade Secrets.)Accordingly I’d also be surprised if EU trade policy now changes much from before the campaign. The New Zealand and Australia trade deals will be unfrozen (the former more quickly than the latter) and the process of creating the anti-coercion tool and the CBAM — the latter much more slowly thanks to its legal and technical complexity — will continue. The EU is taking a more interventionist approach on trade, for sure. But we’re a long way from Le Pen’s wilder ideas of in effect dismantling the Single Market, breaking the union up into a loose association of independent states and thus ending the idea of a unified EU trade policy for good.As well as this newsletter, I write a Trade Secrets column for FT.com every Wednesday. Click here to read the latest, and visit ft.com/trade-secrets to see all my columns and previous newsletters too.Charted watersFinance officials are not known for their emotive language, but these are not normal times, as last week’s IMF gathering proved. US Treasury secretary Janet Yellen used the gathering in Washington to condemn Russia’s “illegal, unprovoked war against Ukraine”. She and her counterparts from the UK, the EU and Canada then walked out.It was up to Kristalina Georgieva, IMF managing director, to explain — as the above chart illustrates — that the net effect of the conflict will be damage on the entire global economy. Russia’s invasion had been a “massive setback” for the global economy, Georgieva said, as the fund published sharply lower forecasts for 2022 from the 4.4 per cent estimated as recently as January to 3.6 per cent. None of this was surprising, at least to FT readers. Martin Wolf explained last month how the world is now at risk of moving into two economic blocs with damaging economic and security consequences.As with so many economic hardships, it will be the poor that suffer the most. The IMF’s fiscal and financial stability departments warned of debt distress among poorer countries as they faced a perfect storm of increasing inflation, lower growth and higher US interest rates. (Jonathan Moules)Trade linksBoth the European Commission president and the UK prime minister have been in India in the past few days, talking up chances for co-operation on trade and technology.Treasury secretary Janet Yellen revealed the limits of US economic aggression towards Russia by cautioning European countries against a full embargo on Russian oil and gas.Research from the shipping company Flexport looks at the cost of trucking and concludes that high prices may be due for a downturn.In the light of protests about the soaring cost of food, pushed higher by the war in Ukraine, two academics look at the history of food riots. A piece in Foreign Affairs argues that the EU has done better at integrating its single market than the US. One of my most treasured colleagues at the FT, David Gardner, has sadly died. Here’s his beautifully written obituary. More

AMSTERDAM (Reuters) – Europe’s biggest port Rotterdam said that goods throughput fell by 1.5% in the first quarter as trade was hit by the impact of sanctions on Russia, and it expects the conflict in Ukraine to hit volumes for the full year.In 2021, 30% of oil imports via Rotterdam were from Russia, while 25% of its liquefied natural gas imports came from Russia and 20% of coal that arrived in the Dutch port.The Port of Rotterdam said it was too early to judge how much volumes from Russia had fallen but “by now in virtually all sectors the impact is visible from the sanctions and the decisions by individual companies not to do business with Russia.”The port said that falling container volumes to Russia had become apparent in March as most shipping companies stopped taking Russian container bookings, and most deep-sea terminals had halted exports as well.Russian oil, coal and gas are not yet subject to European sanctions, but some companies, including Shell (LON:RDSa), have stopped or slowed doing business with Russian companies voluntarily and ahead of likely further sanctions.The port said that 113.6 million tonnes of goods in total were transhipped via Rotterdam in the first quarter of 2022, down from 115.2 million in the same period of 2021.”We expect that the developments in Ukraine and the greatly worsened relationship between Russia and many other countries will impact throughput volumes in the rest of the year as well,” Port of Rotterdam CEO Allard Castelein said in a statement.The loss of trade with Russia was partly offset by rising trade elsewhere. “Since March, oil companies are taking less oil from Russia,” the port said, noting that the overall volume of raw oil imported had remained almost flat at 25.5 million tonnes.LNG imports jumped 78% in the first quarter from a year earlier to 2.7 million tonnes.The port noted that high prices had hit German steel production, contributing to a 20% fall in iron ore imports.Disruptions to trade from China due to lockdowns there also posed a risk.”In the first quarter the consequences of the COVID lockdowns in Shanghai were not yet visible in Rotterdam,” the port said. More

KUALA LUMPUR (Reuters) – Countries should pause or slow use of edible oil as biofuel to ensure adequate supply for use in food, a state-backed Malaysian palm oil group said on Monday, warning of a supply crisis following an Indonesian ban on palm oil exports. Indonesia, the world’s top producer and exporter of the edible oil, sent shockwaves through the market on Friday when it announced it would impose a ban from April 28.Global edible oil supplies were already choked by adverse weather and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and now global consumers have no option but to pay top dollar for supplies.Disruption from conflict has exacerbated price rises in food commodities, which were already running at 10-year highs in the Food and Agriculture Organization’s index, threatening a jump in global malnourishment.”Exporting countries and importing countries need to have their priorities right, this is the time to temporarily reconsider food versus fuel priorities,” said director general of the Malaysian Palm Oil Board Ahmad Parveez Ghulam Kadir.”It’s very important for countries to ensure available oils and fats are used for food and … temporarily stop or reduce their biodiesel mandates,” he said, adding countries could resume biodiesel mandates once supply normalises. Palm oil, the most widely used edible oil, is also used as biodiesel feedstock. Indonesia and Malaysia make it mandatory for biodiesel to be mixed with a certain amount of palm oil – 30% and 20% respectively – and just last month said they remain committed to those mandates, despite higher palm prices.Other countries also make biofuels from animal fats and plant oils like corn and soy, and imposed mandates. Demand for such biofuels has boomed from climate change mitigation efforts.Malaysia accounts for 31% of global palm oil supply, second after Indonesia’s 56%.Although Malaysia is expected to benefit from Indonesia’s drastic policies, producers face a pandemic-induced labour shortage and said they cannot fill the global supply gap.Malaysia also needs to look at its stock and production forecast to ensure local demand is not neglected while fulfilling global demand, Ahmad Parveez said. SELLERS’ MARKETInvestors have been anticipating Malaysia would bring in tens of thousands of migrant workers to staff plantations and boost production. However, the Malaysian Palm Oil Association (MPOA) said the influx of workers would raise production by only 1 million tonnes at most.”The reality is, we can increase our production but this still wouldn’t be enough to meet world demand,” MPOA Chief Executive Officer Nageeb Wahab said.The association, which represents plantation giants like FGV Holdings and Sime Darby Plantation, said Indonesia’s ban has added urgency to addressing the labour crunch and it would urge the government to accelerate recruitment.Indonesia’s ban is set to shift demand to Malaysia, making it a rare sellers’ market, Nageeb said. “We are in a very rare situation, I think this situation is going to be prolonged… The sellers get to decide who to sell to, and what product to sell whether crude palm oil or refined.” More

The writer is chair of Rockefeller InternationalFrench president Emmanuel Macron’s re-election victory may be a triumph for what remains of Europe’s pragmatic political centre, but voters in France are in no mood for more economic reform. Though increasingly angry about the state of the nation, they won’t support any leader who tries to fix what ails it most: the bloated state. Outside a few tiny outliers and possibly communist North Korea, France’s government spends more heavily than any other in the world.In 2017, the French had a real choice on this key issue. Macron vowed to downsize the state and his rival Marine Le Pen promised to expand it further. Voters chose Macron by a large margin, giving him what appeared to be a clear mandate for change. Ever the reluctant capitalists, the French public hit the streets in protest when Macron tried to deliver.Macron had promised to reduce state spending — then a record at more than 56 per cent of gross domestic product — by about 5 percentage points. Instead, under pressure from protests and the pandemic, state spending rose to a staggering 60 per cent of GDP.France’s government spending is 15 points above the average for developed economies. Moreover, that gap is explained less by heavy spending on education, health or housing than on welfare programmes, which at 18 per cent of GDP is nearly double the average for developed economies. France is stuck in a welfare trap, spending generously on income transfers but pushed by voters to spend even more, given discontent with the rising cost of living and with inequality. Despite its strengths, from large-scale manufacturing to luxury goods, France remains at best an average economic competitor. Its growth rate has long hovered at or below the developed world average. And though GDP growth has picked up under Macron, it averaged just 1 per cent a year in his first term, which ranks 13th among the top 20 developed economies over that period.The French state, taxing heavily to fund its spending habits and muscular regulatory arms, is a major reason for this mediocrity. France’s government deficit is 7 per cent of GDP and its public debt is 112 per cent, both among the heaviest burdens of any developed country.The French ship of state stays afloat owing in part to wealth accumulated over generations — but even that has a downside. Demands for social levelling are fuelled by one of the most top-heavy billionaire elites in the developed world. Total billionaire wealth doubled under Macron to 17 per cent of GDP, and nearly 80 per cent of French billionaires’ wealth is inherited — among the highest in the world. To his credit, Macron’s reforms did create pockets of dynamism. He loosened up the labour market, making French labour costs competitive with Germany’s for the first time in years. He scrapped a contentious wealth tax, slowing an exodus of high-end talent.Above all, those reforms helped drive investment up to 25 per cent of GDP, fourth highest among large developed countries. Concentrated in the private sector, investment is fuelling a new start-up culture and a comeback in cities beyond Paris. But Macron was re-elected at the weekend with a narrower margin of victory and a weaker mandate for reform, so this was probably as good as progress gets for France.As the first round of voting showed, the parties of the far left and right have expanded, shrinking the traditional parties of the centre to the brink of extinction, and both extremes are united in favour of bigger government. Squeezed from both sides, Macron has retreated from “radical” centrist reform — recently watering down plans to raise the retirement age, for example. Meanwhile, Le Pen’s proposals unequivocally favour a bigger government.Though it is hard to say how much government is too much, robust economic growth requires balance. Countries need to be aware when the state is too fat or too thin — both can be harmful. France’s government is so oversized relative to the competition, especially when it comes to welfare payments, it is a wonder the country isn’t facing a financial crisis. The state-led model stays solvent because tax compliance is relatively high in France, and because its borrowing is enabled by low eurozone interest rates. The downside: by avoiding crises, France faces little pressure to accept major reform. So it is almost certain to get more of what voters signal they want, an even fatter state. For all its richness in history, culture and wealth, a nation of reluctant capitalists looks destined to muddle through. More

(Reuters) – Craig Fuller monitors millions of transactions between U.S. truckers and their customers as chief executive of transportation data company FreightWaves – and he does not like what he is seeing. There has been an unexpectedly sharp downturn in demand to truck everything from food to furniture since the beginning of March and rates in the overheated segment that deals in on-demand trucking jobs – known as the spot market – are skidding. “It basically just dropped off a cliff,” said Fuller, who is concerned that the United States is at the start of a trucking recession that could decimate truckers’ ability to dictate prices and push some small trucking firms into bankruptcy. Meanwhile, investors and financial analysts worry what will happen if the trucking slump deepens and spreads. History has proven trucking to be a possible indicator for the U.S. economy. That is because when people buy less, companies ship less – and business activity slows. Economic recessions followed six of the 12 trucking recessions since 1972, according to an analysis by trucking data company Convoy.GRAPHIC-U.S. trucking demand skids in 2022 – https://graphics.reuters.com/USA-SHIPPING/TRUCKING/jnpweremrpw/chart.png Experts predicted trucking would soften a bit as pandemic-weary consumers shifted some spending from goods to services in response to the United States lifting COVID prevention measures. But they did not foresee Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which sent fuel prices to record highs, jolted already volatile stock markets, and forced shoppers to hit pause.And now, trucking’s most demand-sensitive sector – the spot market – is in correction territory.”It is the proverbial ‘canary in the mineshaft’,” said Joseph Rajkovacz, director of governmental affairs for the Western States Trucking Association. The group represents small trucking companies that dominate the spot market, which handled as much as 30% of freight during the height of the pandemic.The spot rate deterioration hit when diesel prices were roughly doubling, battering the take-home pay of truckers like Marco Padilla, 63. A few years ago, California-based Padilla spent 25-30 cents per mile to run his truck. “So for every dollar (of pay), I was pocketing 70 cents. Now it costs $1 a mile,” said Padilla.Average first-quarter spot rates, excluding fuel, dove 55 cents from $2.78 per mile in mid-January to $2.23 on April 14. Spot rates normally drop about 22 cents per mile during that period, said Dean Croke, freight market analyst at DAT Freight & Analytics. While spot rates remained 37 cents per mile above what they were during the last bull market for trucking in April 2018, they fell 6 cents year-over-year earlier this month – marking the first such reversal of the current cycle. “That’s where the fear is. Is that the floor? Does this keep going?” Croke said of the demand-led decline. BOOM TO BUST?The share of freight handled by the U.S. spot trucking market roughly doubled after consumer spending on durable goods surged some 20% during the pandemic. In their rush to keep up, retailers and other shippers focused on speed over efficiency – using more trucks and exacerbating demand for them.At one point, the truckload spot market was handling more than 1 million loads per day, versus its historical average of about 400,000, said Brent Hutto, chief relationship officer at TruckStop.com, which – like DAT – matches truckers with spot market loads.But demand tumbled in March, when retail sales excluding purchases of gasoline fell 0.3%. Online sales, which surged during the pandemic, declined for the second month in a row. Skyrocketing diesel prices convinced shippers to wait to fill truck trailers, rather than rushing them out partially loaded – further moderating demand, analysts said.Big trucking firms like JB Hunt (NASDAQ:JBHT) Transport Services and Knight-Swift Transportation Holdings are somewhat insulated by their one-year, fixed-price contracts with companies ranging from Walmart (NYSE:WMT) and Home Depot (NYSE:HD) to Procter & Gamble (NYSE:PG). Walmart and many other companies have in-house trucking while also employing outside firms. Stifel transportation analyst Bert Subin said in a research note that he expects soft truckload demand in the second and third quarters, followed by a holiday season-fueled fourth-quarter rebound. Deutsche Bank (ETR:DBKGn) earlier this month predicted interest rate hikes will tip the United States into recession next year. Meanwhile, some shippers are asking for shorter trucking contracts, “given their belief that rates may tick lower,” Cowen transportation analysts said in a recent note.Indeed, some executives like Fraser Townley, CEO of video gaming controller seller T2M, are celebrating the declining trucking prices as a relief to their profit margins.”They’re about one-third down. There’s still a long way to go,” Townley said. More

Investing.com — Risk assets around the world tumbled as Covid-19 reached the Chinese capital of Beijing, hitting all local markets hard and adding to fears of stagflation further afield. Palm oil rose 7% as the world’s largest producer, Indonesia, imposed an export ban to stop domestic prices rising. U.S. stocks are set to extend Friday’s losses, with Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) not unduly moved by news that its board had met with Elon Musk to discuss his bid at the weekend. Emmanuel Macron handily beat far-right challenger Marine Le Pen to win a second term as President of France, while German business confidence avoids a second straight monthly drop. Here’s what you need to know in financial markets on Monday, 25th April.1. Panic buying in Beijing triggers panic selling everywhere elseChinese assets tumbled, dragging down European stocks and global prices for oil and industrial metals, as the wave of Omicron-variant Covid-19 reached the capital city, Beijing.Newswires reported panic buying of foodstuffs and other essentials as the city’s 21 million inhabitants braced for a lockdown similar to that which has roiled Shanghai and other major centers in recent weeks.The Shanghai Shenzhen CSI 300 index fell over 6% and the Hang Seng 3.7%, while Iron ore futures fell over 10% as traders fretted about the possible closure of the region’s steel mills. The offshore Chinese yuan lost nearly 1% to its lowest in just under two years, having also come under pressure from a separate direction: the People’s Bank of China has reportedly authorized banks to loosen lending conditions to a raft of troubled developers, whose mountain of unsold properties has grown as Covid lockdowns have gummed up the housing market still further.2. Twitter board softens on Musk stanceThe board of Twitter has started discussions with Tesla (NASDAQ:TSLA) CEO Elon Musk about a possible sale, according to various reports. If confirmed, that would represent an abrupt reversal by the social media company after it adopted a poison-pill defense to block Musk’s unwelcome $43 billion bid.Musk had last week announced that he had secured funding for his bid, making it harder for Twitter’s board to dismiss it out of hand. The Wall Street Journal and others reported that the two sides had met on Sunday and were making progress, although there were few details available.Twitter (NYSE:TWTR) stock rose 1.2% in premarket trading but was still nearly 9% below Musk’s offer price of $54.20, which he has said is his “best and final” proposal. The discount reflects ongoing skepticism that the bid will succeed.3. Stocks set to open lower; Philips plunges after earnings miss; Coke earnings eyedU.S. stocks are set to open sharply lower later, as the weekend news of China confirms the market in the pessimistic mindset it had shown on Friday.By 6:10 AM ET (1010 GMT), Dow Jones futures were down 265 points, or 0.8%, while S&P 500 futures and Nasdaq 100 futures were down in parallel. The three benchmark cash indices had all lost between 2.5% and 2.8% on Friday, the worst and broadest one-day selloff this year, largely on fears of aggressive interest rate hikes from the Federal Reserve to rein in galloping inflation.Stocks likely to be in focus later include Coca-Cola (NYSE:KO) and Activision Blizzard (NASDAQ:ATVI), whose quarterly results are due. Overnight, Dutch-based medical technology group Philips saw its stock plunge 11% to a six-year low after it expanded a ventilator recall, while Swiss-based pharma giant Roche (SIX:RO) fell after its core first-quarter profit fell by one-third. Roche also fell after warning of a slowdown in Covid test kit sales. Nissan (OTC:NSANY) ADRs will also be in focus after reports that Renault (EPA:RENA) may unload part of its stake in order to finance its own investments.4. Macron wins re-election, thanks to retirees; Ifo index stabilizesEmmanuel Macron became the first French president to win re-election in two decades, comfortably seeing off far-right challenger Marine Le Pen by 59%-41% in a head-to-head run-off on Sunday.The margin was wider than had seemed likely two weeks ago after the first round of voting and gave a modest degree of support to the euro and Eurozone government bonds – albeit that was lost in the more negative news coming out of the U.S. and China.Le Pen’s performance still represents a sharp improvement on the same run-off five years ago, which she lost by a margin of 66%-34%. Notably, every age bracket under the age of 60 broke for her.Elsewhere in Europe, German business confidence stabilized at a low level in April, according to the Ifo Business Climate index. The survey was stronger than expected, but Ifo still warned of fresh supply chain pressures down the line due to China’s Covid issues and the war in Ukraine.5. Oil tumbles on China demand fears; Dallas Fed survey due; Palm oil surgesCrude oil prices fell sharply as the prospect of lockdowns in Beijing threatened to make an even bigger hole in Chinese demand. Bloomberg had reported on Friday that China’s demand was already running at an average 1.2 million barrels a day less than March due to the restrictions in Shanghai – which remain largely in place more than three weeks since their introduction.By 6:20 AM ET, U.S. crude futures were down 4.1% at $97.88 a barrel, while Brent futures were down 3.9% at $102.02 a barrel.Prices got a modicum of support from reports of a fire on Russia’s largest Europe-facing oil export pipeline, after an explosion at some of its fuel storage tanks near the Ukrainian border.The Dallas Federal Reserve’s monthly business survey may shed light later on the outlook for U.S. output after a full month of prices staying above $100. Other commodities also continue to show signs of tension, with Palm Oil Futures in Kuala Lumpur rising 7% in response to the decision on Friday by Indonesia (by far the world’s largest exporter) to ban exports in an effort to keep domestic prices low. Soybean oil, a substitute for some uses of palm oil, rose as much as 1.9% in Chicago to near all-time highs. More