Today the financial markets were shaken by the leak of reports from the US Treasury’s body for investigating financial crimes. The leak contained years’ worth of information about banks from all over the world that reportedly allowed trillions of dollars of fraudulent transfers to happen. Among the biggest names involved are HSBC, Barclays, Deutsche Bank, and ING. China is supposedly working on a move against HSBC as it has lost trust in the bank.
On the topic of China, the TikTok/WeChat drama continues. Despite President Trump’s order to shut down WeChat in the United States, the company will actually continue its US operations thanks to a court ruling that found Trump’s order to be unconstitutional.
TikTok is also catching a break, thanks to progress in its negotiations with Oracle and Walmart, who are to join the company on the US side and help it remain active in the United States.
Meanwhile, the United States continues to deal with its own share of administrative trouble. The Republicans and the Democrats have still not reached an agreement on a new stimulus plan. However, due to Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg passing away this weekend, the government’s work will remain in disarray for a few days.
The stock indices in the US are on the downside today, in large part because a stimulus plan is not expected soon. In addition, the stocks of banks, especially those implicated in the leak, are quite volatile today.
In other news, Europe is facing a worsening in the situation with the coronavirus. The United Kingdom is now one step closer to a lockdown due to the sharp increase in cases daily. France and Spain are also still struggling. In general, countries in Europe are considering travel and other types of restrictions and keeping partial lockdown measures in place.
The number of coronavirus cases globally has reached 31.2 million. The United States officially surpassed seven million, while India is close to 5.5 million and Brazil is at 4.5 million cases.
