Міжнародні резерви України в січні 2018 року скоротилися на два відсотки, повідомили в Національному банку України. Станом на 1 лютого резерви становили понад 18,4 мільярда доларів.

Скорочення міжнародних резервів України в НБУ пояснюють двома причинами.

«По-перше, у січні було здійснено платежі уряду з обслуговування та погашення державного та гарантованого державою боргу в іноземній валюті на суму 565,6 мільйона доларів. Зокрема, 468,5 мільйона доларів було спрямовано на обслуговування і погашення за Облігації внутрішніх державних позик, деномінованими в іноземній валюті», – заявили в НБУ.

Другою причиною регулятор називає «валютні інтервенції для згладжування надмірних курсових коливань, викликаних тимчасовими факторами». Згідно з повідомленням, у січні НБУ здійснив продаж іноземної валюти на міжбанківському валютному ринку на 266,8 мільйона доларів.

5 січня Національний банк повідомив, що у 2017 році міжнародні резерви України зросли на 21 відсоток. Станом на 1 січня 2018 року вони становили понад 18,8 мільярда доларів.
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Офіційний курс гривні до долара США зріс на 28 копійок, повідомляє 6 лютого офіційний сайт Національного банку України. Регулятор зафіксував результати торгів на міжбанківському валютному ринку, встановивши на 7 лютого курс 27 гривень 46 копійок за долар.

Національний банк України 6 лютого тричі виходив на міжбанківський валютний ринок, купуючи долар, щоб не допустити надмірних коливань.

Фахівці пов’язують зміцнення гривні щодо долара насамперед із успішним розміщенням облігацій внутрішньої державної позики, здійсненої Міністерством фінансів. Приваблива прибутковість цих паперів для нерезидентів змушує їх продавати валюту для накопичення гривні та оплати за цінні папери України.
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U.S. stock prices fluctuated wildly Tuesday after regaining ground following a sharply lower open on the heels of selloffs earlier in the day in Asia and Europe.

The volatility continued unabated one day after The Dow Jones Industrial Average shed the most points in one day in its more than 120-year history.

The Dow fell 530 points at the market open and the more broad-based Standard & Poors 500 Index (S&P 500) tumbled 1.3 percent. The technology heavy Nasdaq Composite Index dropped 1.1 percent.

Earlier Tuesday, Asia’s benchmark stock indexes collapsed, as Monday’s massive selloffs on Wall Street rolled across the globe.

Japan’s Nikkei 225 index lost as much seven percent of its value at one point during the trading session, before closing at 21,610 points, a loss of nearly five percent.  Hong Kong’s Hang Seng index followed suit, dropping just over five percent in its worst trading day since August 2015.

The benchmark indexes Australia and South Korea also suffered serious losses.

In early Europe trading London’s FTSE 100 was down 3.5 percent at 7,081 points.

Asian markets were caught in the ripple effect of Monday’s 1,175-point loss on the Dow, marking the biggest point decline in history.  The S&P 500 also had a bad day, losing just over four percent to finish at 2,648 points.  

The stock market has now lost about a trillion dollars in value since Friday, when the Dow lost 666 points.  That drop followed a solid jobs report that showed the U.S. economy adding 200 thousand jobs and wages rising at the fastest pace in a decade. The tighter labor market and rising wages prompted investor fears of higher inflation and the possibility that the U.S. Federal Reserve would raise interest rates faster and higher than they have in recent years.

Analysts who spoke with VOA had been expecting a stock market “correction,” a decline of at least 10-percent from the most recent record highs, as a result of the record run-up in stock prices this year.  

 
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China’s decision last month to ban the import of certain types of waste and crack down on “foreign garbage” has had a ripple effect worldwide, forcing countries to quickly rethink their waste strategies.

That includes China, where its own fight against recycled waste has only just begun, analysts say.

Prior to the ban, China was the final resting place for about half of the globe’s metal, plastic and paper recyclables.

But in an effort to protect the environment and public health, Chinese authorities have banned the import of 24 categories of solid waste, sending shock waves through the international waste processing industry.

In the wake of the ban, most developed countries including Britain, the United States and Australia are grappling with a growing mountain of unprocessed rubbish and trying to find alternative destinations in Asia to fill China’s enormous shoes.

But Greenpeace East Asia plastic campaigner Eric Liu warned of the danger in their efforts to shift their trash headache to yet another developing country.

“This isn’t really a feasible solution, very few places are equipped to handle the sheer volume of waste that was being processed in China. Ultimately, the foreign trash ban should act as a wake up call to the world. We seriously need to cut down on our production and consumption of plastic,” Liu wrote in an emailed reply.

Environmentalists like Liu are hoping the development will motivate countries to eliminate unnecessary waste such as single-use plastic products.

Waste was one key topic Theresa May discussed when she met with Chinese leader Xi Jinping last week.

Last month, the British prime minister pledged to eradicate all avoidable plastic waste in Britain by 2042 as part of a 25-year green strategy.

Positive for China

Observers also note the ban is a positive step for China, although it has resulted in a shortage of some raw materials for the country’s manufacturing sector.

Local environmentalists hope the ban will spur the country’s waste processing industry to modernize and become more efficient.

“The domestically-produced, consumed and disposed waste should be recycled locally,” said Mao Da, researcher of solid waste treatment at Beijing Normal University.

“Prior to the ban, part of those foreign recyclable rubbish was of better quality and in greater quantity. That led to the country’s earlier dependence on foreign recyclable waste,” he said, adding, “The potential of locally-disposed recyclables has long been overlooked.”

Making China environmentally-friendlier

The researcher urges the environmental regulator to quickly enforce policies that will make households’ recycling and sorting of solid waste mandatory.

But Jason Wang, general secretary of the China Scrap Plastics Association said the country’s waste has already been fully recycled. He said that the import ban is a natural move following China’s rising awareness toward the environment and stricter standards for waste processing.

“With or without the ban and before 2017, any waste in China that was recyclable and of economic values had been fully recycled,” Wang said.

“China has an enormous army of scavengers with much of its population still living around the poverty line. As a result of their contribution, the country’s waste has long been fully recycled. So, the import ban is irrelevant to the country’s recycling [efficiency] of local waste,” he added.

Feng Juan, research director of Incom Recycle Co., a Beijing-based recycler of used plastic bottles, disagreed.

The company’s earlier experience showed that many of the used plastic bottles in Beijing might have been left unrecycled as its affiliated factory used to have a hard time sourcing enough used bottles to fill its annual processing capacity of 50,000 tons. According to estimates, Beijing generates 150,000 tons in used plastic bottle waste each year, Feng said.

Feng said the way local collectors had processed used bottles without a proper wastewater management in place further prompted the company in 2012 to facilitate a smarter way to source used bottles by bypassing those middlemen.

The company has since installed 5,000 vending machines in Beijing that collected 55 million used bottles directly from consumers last year.

“Through our platform, we can trace every single bottle we have collected and guarantee its safe [processing] flow,” Feng said. “While in the past, no one could tell the exact flow of used bottles or where they’ve ended up,” she added.

To-be-tightened use of plastics

China is also taking aggressive steps to tackle its plastic waste problem.

According to Greenpeace’s Liu, an estimated 1.3- 3.35 million tons of the plastic waste that’s polluted the world’s oceans come from Chinese cities.

China’s National Development and Reform commission is reported to have been mulling a new policy, specifically targeting plastic waste generated by the country’s e-commerce, courier and food delivery sectors. Liu said that if that policy is enacted it would be another positive step for China to bring the country’s rampant use of plastics under control.

China has imposed decade-long restrictions on the use of plastics, but lack of teeth in its enforcement has meant little success for the country’s past fight against plastic waste.
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Національний банк України 6 лютого тричі виходив на міжбанківський валютний ринок, щоб не допустити надмірних коливань, повідомляє сайт «Мінфін», який відстежує перебіг торгів. Зранку регулятор двічі здійснював запит найкращого курсу й викупив частину доларів за 27 гривень 51 копійку та 27 гривень 46 копійок відповідно.

Попри ці спроби, гривня продовжувала зміцнюватися, і Нацбанк оголосив аукціон, на якому купив половину із запропонованих йому банками 88 мільйонів доларів за ціною не вище 27 гривень 44 копійок.

Середньозважений курс опустився до рівня 27 гривень 47 копійок, що майже на 30 копійок нижче курсу НБУ, встановленого за підсумками торгів 5 лютого.

Фахівці пов’язують зміцнення гривні щодо долара насамперед із успішним розміщенням облігацій внутрішньої державної позики, здійсненої Міністерством фінансів. Приваблива прибутковість цих паперів для нерезидентів змушує їх продавати валюту для накопичення гривні та оплати за цінні папери України.
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The U.S. trade deficit hit the highest level in nine years in 2017, defying President Donald Trump’s efforts to bring more balance to America’s trade relationships.

The Commerce Department said Tuesday that the trade gap in goods and services rose to $566 billion last year, the highest level since $708.7 billion in 2008. Imports set a record $2.9 trillion, swamping exports of $2.3 trillion.

The U.S. ran an $810 billion deficit in the trade of goods and a $244 billion surplus in services such as banking and education.

The goods deficit with China hit a record $375.2 billion in 2017, and the goods gap with Mexico rose to $71.1 billion. Trump has sought to reduce the deficits with China and Mexico. His administration is weighing whether to impose trade sanctions on China for the theft of U.S. intellectual property. It is also renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada.

The overall December trade deficit in goods and services rose to $53.1 billion, up from $50.4 billion in November and highest since October 2008.

Countries run trade deficits when they buy more from other countries than they sell.

Trump sees trade deficits as a sign of economic weakness and largely as the result of unfair competition by America’s trading partners. Most economists see them largely as the result of bigger economic forces: Americans spend more than they produce, and imports fill the gap.

 
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Venezuela’s central bank on Monday announced a devaluation of more than 99 percent of its official exchange rate with a new foreign exchange platform.

The central bank said the first auction of its new DICOM system yielded an exchange rate of 30,987.5 bolivars per euro, equivalent to around 25,000 per dollar.

That is a devaluation of 86.6 percent with respect to the previous DICOM rate and 99.6 percent from the subsidized rate of 10 bolivars per dollar, which was eliminated last week.

The new rate is still dwarfed by the black market rate for greenbacks, currently at 228,000 bolivars per dollar according to website DolarToday, which is used as a reference.

Venezuela is undergoing a major crisis, with quadruple-digit inflation and shortages of food and medicine. Economists consistently describe the 15-year-old currency control system as the principal obstacle to functioning commerce and industry.

 
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Падіння фондового ринку в США, яке розпочалося ще 2 лютого, перетворилося на обвал 5 лютого. Провідний американський індекс Dow Jones у понеділок упав на 1175 пунктів, втративши близько 4,6%.

У час, коли президент США Дональд Трамп виголошував промову в штаті Огайо, говорячи про переваги запропонованої республіканцями податкової реформи, провідні телеканали країни показували його виступ паралельно з графіком Dow Jones.

«Ми завжди стурбовані, коли ринок втрачає, але ми також упевнені в основних принципах економіки», – заявив представник Білого дому в ефірі CNBC 5 лютого.

Інвестори нині розпродують акції частково й через ознаки посилення економіки, що, на думку багатьох ринкових гравців, спонукає Федеральну резервну систему (вона у США відіграє роль центробанку – ред.) до підвищення процентних ставок.

Індекс Dow Jones два тижні тому закрився на рекордно високому рівні 26 тисяч 616 пунктів.

Трамп та деякі чиновники його адміністрації регулярно посилалися на зростання фондових індексів як ознаку економічного покращення. Від часу перемоги Трампа на виборах 2016 року індекс Dow Jones зріс більш як на 6 тисяч пунктів.
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U.S. President Donald Trump’s tax reform could bring almost $2 trillion back to the United States as U.S. firms repatriate cash piles from foreign affiliates, a U.N. report said Monday.

Ending the incentive to hoard cash overseas could produce a stimulus effect in the United States, and Trump has credited the tax reform with spurring a $350 billion investment plan by Apple.

“Now is the perfect time to bring your business, your jobs, and your investments to the United States of America,” Trump told the World Economic Forum in Davos last month.

The reform ends a system whereby companies defer tax on foreign earnings until the funds are repatriated. Instead it treats those earnings as if they were being repatriated, with an 8 percent tax on non-cash assets and a 15.5 percent tax on cash.

“This measure is widely expected to have the most significant and immediate effect on global investment patterns,” said the report by the U.N. trade and development agency UNCTAD.

Big firms had long awaited such a tax break, having last received one in the 2005 U.S. Homeland Investment Act, which brought $300 billion back from abroad, the report said.

Since then, U.S. overseas retained earnings have grown to $3.2 trillion, half of U.S.-owned foreign direct investment, with about $2 trillion in cash. Unlike in 2005, companies are not required to actually repatriate the funds.

The biggest overseas cash hoarders are in the tech sector, with Apple, Microsoft, Cisco, Alphabet and Oracle holding $530 billion, a quarter of the total, the report said. Other major cash holders are in pharmaceuticals and engineering.

Almost 40 percent of the funds are located in the United Kingdom or its Caribbean offshore territories such as the British Virgin Islands, UNCTAD said, citing data from the Bureau of Economic Analysis.

Even if the money was not invested in tangible assets, its withdrawal could still have a macroeconomic impact, said Richard Bolwijn, UNCTAD’s head of investment research.

“It’s still a part of … the external sources of finance helping to make up for savings shortfalls in developing countries,” he said.

Much of the impact depends on how other countries react, and there is still uncertainty as the details of the tax bill are clarified. In addition, there are some concerns that the U.S. reforms could violate tax treaties and trade rules, the UNCTAD report said.
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U.S. stocks plunged in highly volatile trading on Monday, with both the S&P 500 and Dow Industrials indices slumping more than 4.0 percent, as the Dow notched its biggest intraday decline in history with a nearly 1,600-point drop and Wall Street erased its gains for the year.

The declines for the benchmark S&P500 index and the Dow Jones Industrial Average were the biggest single-day percentage drops since August 2011, a period of stock-market volatility marked by the downgrade of the United States’ credit rating and the eurozone debt crisis, as a pullback from record highs deepened.

The question now for investors, who have ridden a nearly nine-year bull run, is whether this is the long-awaited pullback that paves the way for stocks to again keep rising after finding some value, or the start of a decline that leads to a bear market.

“A lot of people who have been in this market for the past three or four years have never seen this before,” said Dennis Dick, a proprietary trader at Bright Trading LLC in Las Vegas.

“The psychology of the market changed today. It’ll take a while to get that psychology back.”

Bulls argue that strong U.S. corporate earnings, including a boost from the Trump administration’s tax cuts, will ultimately support market valuations. Bears, including short sellers that bet on the market decline, say that the market is over-stretched in the context of rising bond yields as central banks withdraw their easy money policies of recent years.

The U.S. stock market has climbed to record peaks since President Donald Trump’s election, on the prospect of tax cuts, corporate deregulation and infrastructure spending, and it remains up 23.8 percent since his victory. Trump has frequently taken credit for the rise of the stock market during his presidency, though the rally and economic recovery began during the Obama administration.

As the stock market fell on Monday, the White House said the fundamentals of the U.S. economy are strong. U.S. economic growth was running at a 2.6 annualized rate in the fourth quarter last year and the unemployment rate is at a 17-year low of 4.1 percent.

On Monday, the financial, health care and industrial sectors fell the most, but declines were spread broadly as all major 11 S&P sectors dropped at least 1.7 percent. All 30 of the blue-chip Dow industrial components finished negative.

With Monday’s declines, the S&P 500 erased its gains for 2018 and is now down 0.9 percent in 2018. The Dow is down 1.5 percent for the year.

The market’s pullback comes amid concerns about rising bond yields and higher inflation which were heightened following Friday’s January U.S. jobs report that also prompted worries that the Federal Reserve will raise rates at a faster pace than expected this year.

“The market has had an incredible run,” said Michael O’Rourke, chief market strategist At JonesTrading In Greenwich, Connecticut.

“We have an environment where interest rates are rising. We have a stronger economy so the Fed should continue to tighten … You’re seeing real changes occur and different investments are adjusting to that,” O’Rourke said.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 1,175.21 points, or 4.6 percent, to 24,345.75, the S&P 500 lost 113.19 points, or 4.10 percent, to 2,648.94 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 273.42 points, or 3.78 percent, to 6,967.53.

The S&P 500 ended 7.8 percent down from its record high on Jan. 26, with the Dow down 8.5 percent over that time. The declines come after the Dow and S&P posted their biggest weekly percentage drops since January 2016, and the Nasdaq posted its biggest weekly drop since February 2016.

Even with the sharp declines, stocks finished above their lows touched during the session.

At one point, the Dow fell 6.3 percent or 1,597 points, the biggest one-day points loss ever, as it fell through both the 25,000 and 24,000 levels during trading. Traders speculated that the breaching of technical levels prompted a frenzy of automated selling.

“It doesn’t look like people are working their orders — the programs are trading this,” Dan Ryan, who works on the New York Stock Exchange floor for E&J Securities, said as he was leaving work for the day.

Investors also unloaded riskier corporate bonds during the Wall Street rout. Exchange-traded funds that focus on junk bonds suffered a third day of losses. BlackRock’s iShares iBoxx High Yield Corporate Bond ETF, which has about $16 billion in assets, fell 0.6 percent to its lowest share price since December 2016.

The CBOE Volatility index, the closely followed measure of expected near-term stock market volatility, jumped 20 points to 30.71, its highest level since August 2015.

“One thing is that going into the last week or so, investor bullishness was in the top decile of its historical range, which suggests that investors were pretty optimistic, with high expectations and largely complacent,” said Jack Ablin, chief investment officer with Cresset Wealth Advisors in Chicago. “There’s kind of an emotional reversal that’s going on.”

About 11.5 billion shares changed hands in U.S. exchanges, well above the 7.6 billion daily average over the last 20 sessions.

Declining issues outnumbered advancing ones on the NYSE by a 8.64-to-1 ratio; on Nasdaq, a 6.92-to-1 ratio favored decliners.

The S&P 500 posted 1 new 52-week highs and 38 new lows; the Nasdaq Composite recorded 17 new highs and 164 new lows.
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Recent losses on global financial markets, including those in the U.S., have some investors concerned about expectations for their holdings and plans for the future.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average declined 2.5 percent Friday, its largest percentage drop since Britain’s decision in June 2016 to leave the European Union.

The Dow and the broader U.S. Standard & Poor’s 500 Index ended the week roughly 4-percent lower, their biggest weekly drops since early 2016, amid fears of inflation and disappointing quarterly corporate earnings results.

Key stock indexes in Europe also fell Friday. Germany’s DAX index dropped 1.7-percent, while France’s CAC 40 Index declined 1.6-percent.

In Asia, Japan’s Nikkei 225 Index slid nearly 1-percent and South Korea’s Kospi fell 1.7-percent.

Meanwhile, U.S. bond yields climbed and contributed to the sell-off after the U.S. government reported that wages grew last month at their fastest pace in eight years.

The wage data helped stoke investor concern that the Federal Reserve, the U.S. central bank, will respond to higher inflation by hiking its key interest rate more quickly than anticipated.

Darrell Cronk, head of the Wells Fargo Investment Institute, said an extended period of low interest rates has helped create the uncertainty.

“We’ve enjoyed low interest rates for so long, we’re having to deal with a little bit higher rates now, so the market is trying to figure out what that could mean for inflation.”

The yield on the benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury notes rose to 2.852-percent, its highest level in more than four years. The rise in bond yields hinders stock performance in two ways: it makes corporate borrowing more expensive and it makes bonds more attractive to investors compared to riskier stocks.

Bond strategists were unwilling Friday to predict what lies ahead for interest rates this week after the markets’ unusual volatility in the past week.

Investors may get a hint of the direction of interest rates when trading resumes in Asia early Monday, and possibly more insight after the U.S. Treasury’s $66 billion in auctions of 3-, 10- and 30-year bonds from Tuesday to Thursday.
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