European stocks advanced in the first week of the new year as economic reports from around the world added to optimism that the global economy can weather the fallout from the eurozone’s sovereign-debt crisis.
Eurasian Natural Resources Corp and Fiat SpA led gains in mining companies and carmakers, both climbing at least 11 percent. Banks limited gains as UniCredit SpA slumped 38 percent, its largest drop since at least 1989, after announcing that it would hold its planned rights offer at a discount.
The benchmark STOXX Europe 600 Index rose 1.2 percent to 247.53 in the first five trading days of this year for the benchmark measure’s third consecutive week of gains. The gauge has advanced 5.9 percent since Dec. 16 last year as US reports from manufacturing activity to durable-goods orders showed the economic recovery is gathering pace.
“The good news is that in the absence of a European meltdown, most of the global economy has been improving,” Russ Koesterich, the San Francisco-based global chief investment strategist at the iShares unit of BlackRock Inc, wrote in a note on Thursday. “The most recent measures indicate that growth in the US, other developed countries and emerging markets is stabilizing, albeit at a below-trend level.”
Reports in the past week showed that manufacturing in Germany, the US, China, India, Australia and the UK improved last month. Separate releases showed that private employers added 325,000 workers to payrolls, the biggest increase in records going back to 2001, while US Department of Labor figures on Friday showed the US jobless rate dropped to the lowest level since February 2009.
Concern that European banks would have to raise more capital tempered the STOXX 600’s weekly advance as Germany kicked off the year’s long-dated sovereign-debt auctions. Germany got bids for 5.14 billion euros (US$6.5 billion) of 10-year bunds, while Portugal sold 1 billion euros of three-month bills and France sold 4.02 billion euros of benchmark 10-year bonds. Greece, Italy and Spain will auction their own debt later this month.
National benchmark indices rose in 13 of the 18 Western European markets. France’s CAC 40 Index lost 0.7 percent, the UK’s FTSE 100 Index increased 1.5 percent and Germany’s DAX advanced 2.7 percent.
Stephen Garrett, a 27-year-old graduate student, always thought he would study in China, but first the country’s restrictive COVID-19 policies made it nearly impossible and now he has other concerns. The cost is one deterrent, but Garrett is more worried about restrictions on academic freedom and the personal risk of being stranded in China. He is not alone. Only about 700 American students are studying at Chinese universities, down from a peak of nearly 25,000 a decade ago, while there are nearly 300,000 Chinese students at US schools. Some young Americans are discouraged from investing their time in China by what they see
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New apartments in Taiwan’s major cities are getting smaller, while old apartments are increasingly occupied by older people, many of whom live alone, government data showed. The phenomenon has to do with sharpening unaffordable property prices and an aging population, property brokers said. Apartments with one bedroom that are two years old or older have gained a noticeable presence in the nation’s six special municipalities as well as Hsinchu county and city in the past five years, Evertrust Rehouse Co (永慶房產集團) found, citing data from the government’s real-price transaction platform. In Taipei, apartments with one bedroom accounted for 19 percent of deals last
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