Early on today it became known that Australia, which so far had been spared from the degree of economic decline seen around the world, is finally in an official state of recession. The Australian economy is heavily dependent on China’s industrial efforts, as Australia supplies a lot of the commodities necessary to feed Chinese factories.
The number of coronavirus cases around the globe today is just over 25.9 million. There have been 6.25 million confirmed Covid-19 cases in the United States. The country added almost 42,000 new ones yesterday, which is an increase from the day before. Although the number of new daily infections has retreated from the 70,000+ records seen earlier this summer, there are still lots of ups and downs in the daily statistics coming out of the US, showing that the outbreak is far from over.
Brazil has 3.9 million infections, and India is close behind with 3.7 million, after adding almost 80,000 new Covid-19 registrations yesterday.
In Europe, Spain had its biggest daily increase since the height of the deadly outbreak it experienced earlier this year, confirming over 8,000 new Covid-19 cases yesterday. The same can be said for France, which had a daily spike of almost 5,000 on Tuesday. The distribution curves for both countries show that the lull is over and a return to the previously seen massive outbreaks is quite likely.
In Asia, the biggest daily increases have been in India, the Middle East, the Philippines and Indonesia.
The markets are also following the political developments in Japan, where the ruling Liberal Democratic Party has to choose a new leader after Shinzo Abe’s resignation. Yoshihide Suga, who seems to be investors’ favorite among the most likely candidates for the job, announced that if he is chosen as the next Prime Minister, he will continue to cooperate with the Bank of Japan in order to continue Abe’s economic reforms. The markets will welcome this scenario because it would create the least amount of volatility.
Meanwhile, in the United States Congress is still struggling to reach a compromise on a new stimulus bill, more than a month after the previous package adding unemployment bonuses expired.
President Trump’s administration has also failed to provide support for the millions of unemployed Americans who have been unable to pay rent and faced the threat of eviction. They got helped by the CDC instead, an unlikely source, who claimed that if people were evicted, the pandemic would get worse, and issued orders against it.
