Asia Celebrates as Biden Prints Money
Tokyo's Nikkei led a rally in holiday-thinned trade in Asia on Friday following a record-breaking day on Wall Street with investors buoyed by Joe Biden's huge new infrastructure spending plan and growing optimism over the economic recovery.
With most equity and commodity markets in the region closed for Easter, business was light but the mood remained decidedly upbeat ahead of the release of key US jobs data that is expected to confirm that the world's top economy is getting back on its feet.
Confidence that global growth will soar as vaccines allow economies to open has for now overtaken worries that the rebound will fan inflation and force central banks to wind back their market-boosting monetary policies.
"Before you worry about inflation, there's reflation and I think that's the main theme in the market," Ed Campbell, at QMA, said.
Biden's $2.25 trillion rebuilding package -- coming soon after the passage of his $1.9 trillion stimulus -- has reinforced the view among investors that the US economy will run hot, with analysts saying its corporate tax implications were also being put aside for now.
With this in mind, and after a strong read on US March manufacturing, the S & P 500 broke the 4,000-point barrier for the first time, while the Nasdaq and Dow also enjoyed healthy gains.
And the few markets in Asia that were open followed suit, with Tokyo up more than one percent, Seoul almost one percent higher and Shanghai also in positive territory along with Bangkok.
"The US equity market opened in the second quarter with a sonic boom ushering in a great Good Friday," said Axi strategist Stephen Innes.
He added that equities likely had further to run higher as vaccines are administered around the world, and despite a pick-up in infections in parts of the world including France, which is facing another lockdown.
"Vaccine rollouts remain the game's name and drive the narrative, even with the EU lagging, as investors view this delay in the context that the catch-up is but a function of time," he said.
Eyes are now on the release later Friday of US non-farm payrolls figures, which will give the latest view on the state of the huge economy, with some observers suggesting the reading could come in above one million.
What KXCO Is, and Why the Hard Problem Was Never Intelligence
The prevailing enthusiasm assumes the hard problem is intelligence. It is not. It is that banks, hospitals, courts and governments are being asked to let software act on their behalf with no way to establish who decided, on what basis, or whether the record will still read in a decade. KXCO founder Shayne Heffernan sets out the architecture that answers those questions, drawn as a graph, and argues that properly constructed AI is an amplifier of human judgement rather than a replacement for it.
AI Intelligence Scales. Accountability Does Not. Why KXCO Is Built for It.
Capability is becoming abundant and everything abundant gets cheap. What does not get cheap is the person who has to sign, and they can only carry what they can see. Four conditions follow from that, and four independent authorities reached the first of them last month without knowing it.
AI is the Neat Handwriting of the Illiterate
A model in the hands of someone who has read the filing and walked the plant is a clerk. The same model, speaking for someone who has done neither, is a disguise. On AI slop, phantom citations and factslop, why finish stopped being evidence of work, and the containment layer KXCO built so a machine cannot speak as the institution until a source is attached.
Worthship: Do Not Conform to the Age
Worthship is the older English word for worship, and it means to ascribe worth. Bishop Robert Barron preached Romans 12 on 30 August. This essay follows the text into the prison letters, and puts two questions to a graph: do the four readings of that Sunday agree, and was Paul free or in chains when he wrote about despair?
Every story, signed and delivered.
Subscribe to the kxco channel and get the headline, the AI-written key takeaways, and the chain-anchor link the moment we publish. Audio versions and per-ticker subscriptions arrive in the next iteration.