The headlines today open up with the latest coronavirus developments. The number of infections worldwide has surpassed 56.7 million and over 1.35 million deaths. Yesterday set a record for the day with the highest number of deaths - almost 11,000 people lost their lives due to Covid-19 on Wednesday.
The United States is still the most affected country in the world with a total number of coronavirus infections at just under 12 million. The US also surpassed 250,000 deaths yesterday, another grim milestone. There were 173,000 new Covid-19 cases confirmed in the United States yesterday.
President Trump has stated that he will not order anymore lockdowns, despite the pandemic getting worse. States and cities are now acting on their own, implementing their own restrictions. With hospitalizations at an all-time high in the US, New York City finally announced it will close the schools.
Within the European Union, Italy, Germany, and France are currently experiencing the worst outbreaks and all had over 20,000 new cases yesterday. Italy added close to 35,000 new coronavirus infections to its tally.
Non-EU member Russia is also seeing a massive outbreak and has been registering over 20,000 new Covid-19 cases daily since the beginning of November.
On the economic calendar today we have the initial and continuing jobless claims reports from the United States. It is possible to see a worsening situation on the already affected US job market due to the increase in Covid-19 cases over the past couple of weeks.
Today we also expect several speeches, including by ECB President Lagarde, as well as officials from the Bundesbank in Germany and the Federal Reserve in the US.
The stock markets today have decided that Covid-19 poses too great a risk to the global economy and that the vaccines will take too long to manufacture and supply around the world. The economic fallout from the pandemic will be much more immediate, which is pushing US stock indices down.
Last but not least, today Turkey decided to increase its domestic interest rate by 475 points in an attempt to save its highly inflated currency. The Turkish lira stabilized against the dollar a bit, but remains lower than the maximums seen earlier this month.
