European stocks fell for the first week in six as Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou issued and then withdrew a pledge to hold a referendum on the latest bailout package for his country, reviving concern that the euro area’s debt crisis would spread.
Lloyds Banking Group PLC slumped 19 percent as the British bank said CEO Antonio Horta-Osorio would go on leave. BNP Paribas SA dropped 15 percent as France’s largest bank reported profit that fell short of analysts’ estimates.
The STOXX 600 Europe Index slid 3.7 percent to 239.76 this week, snapping a five-week rally, the gauge’s longest winning streak since April. Stocks fell on concern that eurozone leaders would again fail to speedily implement the region’s rescue plan. Equities extended their losses as G20 leaders meeting in Cannes, France, failed to agree on additional resources for the IMF. Stocks dropped even as the US unemployment rate fell to 9 percent.
“We have yet to see a clear and succinct solution to the eurozone’s political-economic concerns,” Fredrik Nerbrand, head of asset allocation at HSBC Holdings PLC, wrote in a report dated Wednesday.
“The issues surrounding the European financial system will take years to resolve. We have an economic backdrop that is anything but supportive. We remain averse to risk,” he said.
Global policymakers will wait for further details on the increased rescue package before they commit extra cash to the IMF, German Chancellor Angela Merkel said at the end of the G20 summit in Cannes. The IMF could lend any additional money to the European Financial Stability Facility, the currency bloc’s rescue fund.
In the US, a Labor Department report showed that the unemployment rate in the world’s largest economy unexpectedly fell to a six-month low of 9 percent last month, from 9.1 percent in September. Employers added 80,000 jobs to their payrolls last month, fewer than economists had forecast. The Labor Department revised up job gains in the previous two months by 102,000.
National benchmark indexes fell in all 18 western European markets this week. The UK’s FTSE 100 slid 3.1 percent, Germany’s DAX lost 6 percent and France’s CAC 40 Index retreated 6.7 percent.
Napoleon Osorio is proud of being the first taxi driver to have accepted payment in bitcoin in the first country in the world to make the cryptocurrency legal tender: El Salvador. He credits Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s decision to bank on bitcoin three years ago with changing his life. “Before I was unemployed... And now I have my own business,” said the 39-year-old businessman, who uses an app to charge for rides in bitcoin and now runs his own car rental company. Three years ago the leader of the Central American nation took a huge gamble when he put bitcoin
Demand for artificial intelligence (AI) chips should spur growth for the semiconductor industry over the next few years, the CEO of a major supplier to Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) said, dismissing concerns that investors had misjudged the pace and extent of spending on AI. While the global chip market has grown about 8 percent annually over the past 20 years, AI semiconductors should grow at a much higher rate going forward, Scientech Corp (辛耘) chief executive officer Hsu Ming-chi (許明琪) told Bloomberg Television. “This booming of the AI industry has just begun,” Hsu said. “For the most prominent
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Former Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) chairman Mark Liu (劉德音) yesterday warned against the tendency to label stakeholders as either “pro-China” or “pro-US,” calling such rigid thinking a “trap” that could impede policy discussions. Liu, an adviser to the Cabinet’s Economic Development Committee, made the comments in his keynote speech at the committee’s first advisers’ meeting. Speaking in front of Premier Cho Jung-tai (卓榮泰), National Development Council (NDC) Minister Paul Liu (劉鏡清) and other officials, Liu urged the public to be wary of falling into the “trap” of categorizing people involved in discussions into either the “pro-China” or “pro-US” camp. Liu,
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