Biden's plan, -5% from Germany, jobless claims, OPEC report

15. Jan. 2021

Yesterday Biden announced his vision for a new stimulus package for the US economy. The sum is $ 1.9 trillion.

Financial markets took this news rather coolly and as atypically as possible: stock markets did not grow, commodity markets did not show optimism, and cryptocurrency markets began to unfold after some growth. This suggests that the markets are running out of steam.

On the one hand, everything is logical when you look at the number of daily cases and deaths in the United States, as well as the resulting restrictive measures. Yesterday's data on jobless claims reminded the markets about the causal relationship between the pandemic and the economy. The figure of 965K with average expectations of 795K is if not shocking, then sobering for sure.

In addition, the US Congressional Budget Office reported that the budget deficit for the first three months of the new fiscal year increased by 60% compared to the same period last year and amounted to about $ 573 billion. And this amount did not take into account the last stimulus package of $ 900 billion. Given that at the end of 2021, the Budget Office expects a budget deficit of 1.8 trillion. It is not very clear (purely arithmetically) where Biden is going to take money from to implement his stimulus plan.

Germany has reported on the growth rate of GDP in 2020. No growth of course, but drop in fact. GDP fell by 5%. Markets we did not receive anything fundamentally new, simply because the median forecasts of experts were a decline of 5.1%. You can even find a positive for Germany in these data, since there are chances that German economy did not go negative in the 4th quarter.

OPEC has published its monthly oil market outlook. Nothing sensational was detected. But since the markets have recently become accustomed to a permanent negative in the form of downward revisions of forecasts of demand growth rates, the lack of new information was perceived as positive. However, 95.9 million b / d of demand in 2021 is still more than a dubious reason for optimism simply because in the pre-pandemic reality it would have amounted to 100+ million b / d. That is why our position on oil remains unchanged - we sell.