Most global share markets saw gains on Friday, or smaller losses than on Thursday as the sell-off sparked by fears about Donald Trump’s competence eased.
Friday’s better performance offshore flowed through to the local futures market and the ASX will be up more than 20 points later today.
But most markets fell over the last week on the back of the political crisis around President Trump. US shares fell 0.4% after recovering some of their losses on Friday, Eurozone shares fell 1.1%, Japanese shares lost 1.5% and Australian shares shed a nasty 1.9%.
Australian shares are now down around 4% from their high earlier this month and have been hit by the weak global lead combined with pressure on the banks as a result of the Budget’s bank levy along with weakness in retailers on the back of weak retail sales and fears around the competitive threat from Amazon.
Chinese shares managed to buck the global trend and rose 0.6%, the first weekly gain in five weeks.
Reflecting the risk off environment bond yields generally fell, but commodity prices mostly rose helped by a falling US dollar.
Copper, gold, silver and oil all rose.
The iron ore price rose more than $US1 on Friday night to end at $US62.69, according to the Metal Bulletin, but the coal prices were a touch weaker.
Metal Bulletin’s fob Australia premium hard coking coal index fell $US3.96 to $US155.91 per tonne. The fob Australia hard coking coal index was unchanged, at $US150.10 per tonne, as were the cfr China indices, at $US162.84 per tonne for premium hard coking coal and $US155.47 for hard coking coal.
Eurozone shares rose 0.8% on Friday and the US S&P 500 gained 0.7% recovering some of the Trump related hit to markets seen earlier in the week.
On Wall Street the market had its second consecutive weekly decline driven by the ongoing political drama in Washington, despite oil scoring its biggest weekly gain (5% plus) since March ahead of this week’s Opec meeting.
US markets lost some of their earlier gains on Friday afternoon following reports that President Trump had told Russian officials earlier this month that firing former FBI director James Comey had relieved “great pressure” on Mr Trump, and that a senior White House adviser had been identified by the FBI as a “person of interest” in its Russia probe.
The stories, which came as Mr Trump embarked on his first foreign visit, renewed concerns about the White House’s ability to push through its economic agenda.
The S&P 500 finished the day 0.7% higher at 2,381.73, but finished the week down 0.4%. Meanwhile, the Dow closed Friday 0.7% higher at 20,804.84 but was also down 0.4% over the week.
And the tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite rose half a per cent to 6,083.70 on Friday but still ended down 0.6% over the week.
The jitters surrounding Mr Trump also took their toll on the dollar, which fell 2.1% over the week for its biggest five-day drop since April 2016.
In Australia the ASX 200 Index and the All Ordinaries Index each lost 0.2% on Friday to 5727.4 points and 5768.9 points respectively. The ASX200 was off 1.9% for the week and the All Ordinaries w fell 1.7%.
National Australia Bank was the worst performer among the banks, closing down 6% for the week, while Westpac was down 5.3%.
ANZ fell 2.5% (it lost heavily the two previous weeks) and the Commonwealth Bank of Australia fell 1.7%.
BHP rose 2.5% and rival Rio Tinto soared 5% higher. Fortescue Metals leapt a huge 10.6%.
And Fairfax Media shares leapt 16.4% over the week after a second private equity bid was launched for the company.
