ASX set to rise, Wall Street advances amid doubts about Trump's tariffs
On Tuesday will come the latest reading on inflation across the United States. Economists expect it to show inflation accelerated to 2.6 per cent last month from 2.4 per cent in May.
Companies are also lining up to report how they performed during the spring. JPMorgan Chase and several other huge banks will report their latest quarterly results on Tuesday, followed by Johnson & Johnson on Wednesday and PepsiCo on Thursday.
Fastenal, a distributor of industrial and construction supplies, on Monday reported a stronger profit for the latest quarter than analysts expected. Its stock rose 2.9 per cent, though it also said that market conditions remain sluggish.
Shares of Kenvue rose 2.3 per cent in shaky trading after the former division of Johnson & Johnson said CEO Thibaut Mongon is stepping down. Kenvue, the maker of Listerine and Band-Aid brands, is in the midst of a strategic review of its options, 'including ways to simplify the company's portfolio and how it operates,' according to Larry Merlo, the board's chair.
Waters slumped 11.9 per cent after saying it had agreed to merge with Becton, Dickinson and Co.'s biosciences and diagnostic solutions business in a deal valued at roughly $US17.5 billion ($26.7 billion).
In the bond market, Treasury yields held relatively steady. The yield on the 10-year Treasury slipped to 4.42 per cent from 4.43 per cent late Friday.
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In stock markets abroad, indexes fell across much of Europe. Germany's DAX lost 0.4 per cent, and France's CAC 40 fell 0.3 per cent. But indexes rose 0.8 per cent in South Korea and 0.3 per cent in Hong Kong.
Chinese shares advanced after the government reported that exports rose last month as a truce in a tariff war prompted a surge in orders ahead of the August 1 deadline for reaching a new trade deal with Washington.
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ABC News
an hour ago
- ABC News
Lowy Institute South-East Asia aid map reveals retreat of US and Europe from Australia's region
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Sydney Morning Herald
2 hours ago
- Sydney Morning Herald
How Chalmers can square the budget circle despite stagnant productivity
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The Age
2 hours ago
- The Age
How Chalmers can square the budget circle despite stagnant productivity
As if Treasurer Jim Chalmers didn't have a big enough problem trying to improve the economy's productivity, we now know Treasury has privately reminded him he'll need to find additional tax revenue and reduce government spending to keep the budget 'sustainable' – that is, to stop the government's debt getting a lot higher. Some of the measures he'd like to take to get the economy's productivity improving could involve reducing certain taxes but, with the budget already overextended, he can't afford them. He's had to stipulate that all proposals for improving productivity at the productivity roundtable next month must involve no net cost to the budget. This suggests productivity improvement and budget repair will need to be kept in two separate buckets. If so, Chalmers will probably end up avoiding tax changes and sticking to reforming the regulation of certain industries, which would have little cost to the budget. But some measures to improve productivity may lead to increased tax collections. If so, it may be better to put together a big package of interlocking measures that together would help improve both problems. The successful reforms of the 1980s involved big packages, with their size actually helping to reduce opposition to them. When you propose reforms one at a time, those who lose from the measure can make such a fuss that the government decides it's not worth insisting. But you can put together a package so big that most industries and individual taxpayers would gain something as well lose something. So if I oppose the package because of my loss, I put my gain at risk. And not only that; I get a lot more pushback from the many groups and individuals who see themselves as net winners from the package. Even so, if I were Chalmers and cuts in government spending were needed, I'd tread carefully. The independent economist Saul Eslake sees government spending likely to be about 2 percentage points of gross domestic product higher in coming years than it averaged over the 40 years before COVID. In contrast, the former top econocrat Dr Mike Keating thinks that to balance the budget while making adequate provision of government services will leave a gap to be filled of about 4 per cent of GDP.
