Australasian Investment Review (AIR) is a free daily news service with a weekly online magazine covering global financial markets with a focus on Australia, New Zealand and Asia.
Japan, Hong Kong, Taiwan, New Zealand and Singapore are all very much in recession and starting to be concerned that conditions could get worse in 2009.
Gold rose back above $US800 an ounce on Friday and ended the week 8% percent higher, as investors rediscovered the metal after a month of ignoring its supposed virtue of being a safe haven in tough times.
Not the best of times for US bank regulators to be closing busted banks, but that's what we saw with three small domestic banks shut at the weekend, ending a week when we also saw Citigroup lose 60% of its value as nerves were again stretched about the health of the global banking system.
Once again attention will be on the US and Wall Street with more statistics for release, the fate of Citigroup, some earnings and whether news of President-elect Obama's new economic team will still have the impact it did late Friday when it boosted the market more than 6%.
The market is down 106 – was down 159 at worst in-line with the 165 point fall predicted by the SFE Futures this morning.
Macquarie Group shares staged a big rally yesterday off the back of the expected lower profit.
Lion Nathan is going to have to make a bit more noise if it is to merge with Coca-Cola Amatil.
How many bits of bad weather will it take to bring Suncorp to its knees: hopefully that will never happen, but the long suffering shareholders must be wondering if they have done something wrong.
It might be slump time in the steel industry, but there's always room for a strategic investment or two for a global major like Posco.
The Reserve Bank has already given us a couple of surprises with interest rates in the past two months with those bigger than expected cuts on both occasions.
