Early Headlines: Asia Stocks And Dollar Up, Oil,Gold And Yields Down, Fire Ice Threatens, Trumps Says Dems Killed Father And Child, China Shadow Banking Problem, And 17 More Articles

Early Bird Headlines 27 June 2019

Econintersect: Here are some of the headlines we found to help you start your day. For more headlines see our afternoon feature for GEI members, What We Read Today, published Monday, Wednesday and Friday, which has many more headlines and a number of article discussions to keep you abreast of what we have found interesting.

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Key Articles

â€‹Global

Asia Pacific stocks advance as investors await Trump-Xi meeting (CNBC) Markets in Asia Pacific advanced on Thursday as investors awaited the meeting between U.S. President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the G-20 summit. The U.S. dollar index was higher at 96.291, above levels below 96.0 seen earlier in the week. Brent crude futures contract shed 0.6% to $66.09 per barrel, while U.S. crude futures fell 0.62% to $59.01 per barrel. Spot gold was down 0.4% at $1,402.09 per ounce as of 0654 GMT, after shedding more than 1% in the previous session. After U.S. Treasury yields were higher all day in Asia, they faded before markets closed to end lower.

Massive Blobs of ‘Fire Ice’ Lurks Beneath the Ocean. We Know Almost Nothing About Them. (Live Science) There’s a giant trove of frozen methane, or “fire ice,” locked beneath our ocean’s surface. If released, it could trigger tsunamis, landslides and release huge amounts of carbon into our already-warming atmosphere. But we have almost no idea how much there is or where to find it. That’s in part because frozen methane on our planet takes many more forms than we previously thought, and we are only now beginning to recognize some of them, Ann Cook, an associate professor in the School of Earth Sciences at The Ohio State University said during a presentation Tuesday (June 25) at the annual Astrobiology Science Conference in Bellevue, WA.

U.S.

Trump Blames Democrats for Drowning Deaths of Migrant Father, Child (Daily Beast) President Trump told reporters on Wednesday that Democrats and their immigration policies make them responsible for the deaths of a father and a 23-month-old girl in the Rio Grande river earlier this week. See Father and Toddler Daughter Found Drowned, Clinging to Each Other in Rio Grande After Trying to Reach U.S.

China

For China, Kicking a $9 Trillion Habit Is Tough Work (Bloomberg) Shadow-banking activity is picking up, a sign the economy remains overreliant on this opaque funding channel despite Beijing’s efforts. On the surface, it may look like regulators have managed to shrink the role of trust companies, after a wide-ranging, months-long crackdown on China’s financial underbelly. Assets under management at these lightly regulated non-bank financial firms – a hybrid of private equity, asset management and lending – posted their first annual decline last year.

Trust companies are lending directly to parts of the real economy that need it most, beyond bank balance sheets. Financing using trust assets climbed 4.4% in the first quarter, after dropping in the previous three quarters. As this figure rises, the quality of trust assets has deteriorated: The proportion prone to default and repayment risks climbed to a record high of 90% from a year earlier, according to Moody’s Investors Service.