
Chinese protest wave and statistics-heavy week
The unusually large-scale protests against Beijing’s zero-COVID strategy greatly affected equity trading this past Monday, but stock markets bounced back after the Chinese government responded by easing some anti-COVID rules.
This week is full of macro statistics, but the biggest news item will nevertheless be Friday’s US jobs report for November. The Federal Reserve would like to see a weak jobs report, that is, higher unemployment and slower wage and salary growth. This would dampen inflationary pressures and thus help avoid another series of sharp Fed interest rate hikes.