Jobless claims, pandemic in Europe and poisoning of Navalny

In terms of news, Thursday turned out to be a rather calm day, especially against the backdrop of a busy environment on Wednesday.
From the point of view of macroeconomic statistics, the data on jobless claims in the USA were of the greatest interest. Markets expected further improvement in the US labor market.

The data came out mixed. On the one hand, the number of continuing claims dropped to less than 15 million, but on the other hand, the initial applications again exceeded a million. So, this is more of a reason for selling the dollar than buying it.

The important news of the day yesterday was the poisoning of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, as a result the latter ended up in a coma. Considering that this happened just when one of Russia's satellites, Belarus, may well leave the orbit of the Russian Federation, all this looks like a preemptive action of the Russian authorities in order to extinguish the flame of protest moods in the country in the bud. However, we will not delve into politics, we only note that for the Russian stock market and the ruble this is a negative signal, so you can try to make money on this news by selling the ruble and Russian stock indices.

Meanwhile, the United States and China still plan to return to the negotiating table to review the phase one of the trade agreement. Let us remind that the meeting was supposed to take place last Saturday, but was postponed. Yesterday there was information (without specific dates) that the countries agreed on the need for a meeting.

This news is especially important in the context of information from the World Trade Organization (WTO): The WTO "trade barometer" dropped to 84.5 points in June, and is now 15.5 points below the baseline of 100 points and 18.6 points below the June 2019 indicator. "Figures for June turned out to be a record low in the entire history of such statistics since 2007 and roughly correspond to the low point of the financial crisis of 2008-2009," - says the WTO report. This is about the state of the world economy as a whole.

All these problems are caused by the pandemic. The pandemic situation in the United States continues to improve, but this is offset by a sharp deterioration in the situation in Europe. Spain is again the epicenter of the European pandemic (the highest number of cases since April was recorded). Germany is adding 1000 new cases for the third day in a row, and France has the highest increase in cases since the beginning of May.