Global Markets started the previous week with a bearish sentiment. Aside from the ongoing tension in the Ukraine, the fact that Chinese exports presented a Year over Year decrease of -18.1% certainly spurred no optimism. Concerns of decreasing demand for Chinese copper saw the metal's price decrease by 5% to approximately 46K Yuan per ton, on the local market. The situation continued to deteriorate as the week’s economic releases unfolded. Inter alia, South Korea’s Unemployment rate was published to stand at a level of 3.9% in February, versus analyst expectations for no change at a 3.2% print. This was augmented by the Australian Westpac-Melbourne Institute’s presenting a rather pessimistic consumer confidence print of 99.46, and the Japanese Corporate Goods Price Index indicating a Month over Month decrease of -0.2%.
The aggregated effect saw copper lose outside of the Chinese market approximately -4.5% of its price during the week. East Asian equities suffered similar faith as the Hong Kong Hang Seng Index and Japanese NIKKEI 225 closed the last trading week nearly -5% and -5.9% lower than the previous week, respectively. On the plus side, it should be noted that the selloff seemed rather contained for the East Asian markets, and their commodities of importance. When moving further to the west, the spatial effect wears off, somewhat. For example, the French CAC 40 only lost -3.5% throughout the week, while the U.S. based S&P 500 only hedged off about -1.8%. Gold Spot prices gained 3.1% throughout the week.
