An eventful Apr2024 多变的甲辰四月

This April, the month of QingMing prayer and Tax filing, is extraordinarily eventful. These include:

- A solar eclipse across North America.
- Taiwan’s east coast earthquakes at Richter scale 7.3 (3apr) and 6.3 (23apr) respectively, destroying lives, major buildings in epic center HuaLien. This disrupted high-end chips production and related supply chains.
- Janet Yellen’s likely final official visit to China as US Treasury Secretary. Shortly followed by Antony Blinken’s likely final official visit to China as US Secretary of State. Both ended with no real improvement in those thorny US-China trade issues.
- Biden signed a bi-partisan bill to ban TikTok in US unless it is sold to American within the next one year.
- US congress and senate passed a bill funding military aid to Ukraine, Israel, & Taiwan etc, instead of calling an immediate ceasefire or addressing on-going warring parties’ humanitarian disasters.
- South Korea parliamentary election ended with its ruling party’s seats won decimated.
- A higher and longer Fed Fund rate prevails, underpinned by latest NFPR report, core PCE, CPI data etc.
- Commodity (gold, copper, cocoa, aluminum, crude oil etc) prices surged to record high in Apr, with price of bitcoin, USD index all went up synchronously.
- Iran fired few hundreds of drones and missiles into Israel on 13 Apr, to up the ante of middle-east conflict. Israel retaliated symbolically on 19 Apr, sending drones attacks into Syria, Iraq and Iran.
- Israel is preparing to attack Rafah, against US and most international voices. At the eleven hour, ICC threatens to issue arrest warrant against PM Netanyahu. This seems to derail Israeli’s further attacking plan.
- Bitcoin to half its mining reward by Apr2024 and HK launched 6 spot crypto ETFs to rival US ETFs.
- PM formally announced his handover date on 15 May 2024. He is likely to take on the role of Senior Minister thereafter.
- DBS group shares price up more than 6% this month even without adjusting for ex-bonus and ex-dividend from last FY result.
- Yen tumbled & crossed 160 to a US dollar on 29 Apr, BOJ might have intervened to pull it back to 156 handle.