Global Markets

Global stocks surged Monday after the U.S. and China agreed to de-escalate tariffs that had effectively frozen trade between the world’s largest economies.

Dow Futures on Wall Street soared after the White House said both sides had agreed to drastically reduce tariffs for 90 days. 

S&P 500 and Nasdaq futures jumped over 3% and 4%, respectively, ahead of the opening bell.

Global investors scrambling for security rushed to gold on Tuesday, pushing its price to a record $3,500 an ounce, as concerns mount about President Trump’s trade war and his deepening anger at the Federal Reserve chair, Jerome H. Powell.

Gold has set a series of records during an ugly stretch for the markets. Its latest peak came after a particularly rough day on Wall Street, when investors dumped stocks, sold U.S. Treasury bonds and cut their exposure to the dollar, causing its value to drop against most other major currencies.

The global Microsoft computer outage initiated by a faulty CrowdStrike security update gave us a taste of what actual cyberwarfare could do.

Starting soon after midnight New York time, the glitched update brought the “blue screen of death” to PCs across the world.

Microsoft has issued advice to users after a massive outage linked to U.S. cybersecurity company Crowdstrike caused users' systems to suddenly crash.

"We have been made aware of an issue impacting Virtual Machines running Windows Client and Windows Server, running the CrowdStrike Falcon agent, which may encounter a bug check (BSOD) and get stuck in a restarting state," an update posted on the Microsoft Azure website said on Friday morning. "We approximate impact started around 19:00 UTC on the 18th of July."

I’m willing to bet that, until this morning, most people had never heard of CrowdStrike, an Austin-based cybersecurity firm. Only after the company pushed a bad update onto Windows computers, creating the biggest IT disaster in history, did most of us realize how much our lives depend on it. Or how difficult it might be to fix the problem.

The pending development of a $3 billion seaport in Peru will grant China direct access to the South American trade market and will be the first China-controlled port in South America. This and other proposed port development projects illustrate Beijing’s ambitions to strengthen its footprint and influence in diverse regions around the world. The U. S. must increase economic engagement in Latin America to offer the region competitive alternatives for its development. For several decades, policymakers in Washington have paid minimal attention to Latin America.

The recent slide in oil prices is starting to bottom out, according to analysts who predict that a more significant pickup in the coming quarters is in the cards.

Oil prices saw their third consecutive weekly decline last week, marking the longest losing run this year. However, that may soon come to pass, according to some market watchers.

“Now it definitely feels like they’re at the bottom — there are multiple signs of that,” said Citi’s Global Head of Commodities Research Ed Morse.

The global economy will come “perilously close” to a recession this year, led by weaker growth in all the world’s top economies — the United States, Europe and China — the World Bank warned Tuesday.

Chinese health authorities plan to lift Covid-19 quarantine restrictions on international arrivals, part of a broader relaxation in how the deadly disease will be classified for treatment, even as case numbers remain high.

China has maintained among the world’s most restrictive coronavirus lockdown measures, slowing its economy significantly and sparking anger. Following waves of protests this fall, authorities abruptly abandoned the country’s stringent zero-Covid-19 strategy early this month.

This week, scores of African leaders will convene in Washington at the behest of the State Department for its Africa Leaders Summit. The summit’s purpose is to strengthen U.S.-Africa ties on various local and global issues.

While this summit represents a fantastic opportunity for African leaders to voice their needs, concerns and hopes for the continent, as well as rub shoulders with American and international political and policy leaders, we call on the summit not to forget the interests of Africans who will not have a voice there, especially the Biafran community in Nigeria.