GOLD BULLION held dead-flat for the week so far in London on Tuesday, moving in a $10 range around $1855 per ounce as global stock markets and bonds also held unchanged overall but commodities ticked higher as geopolitic tensions rose and the Covid Crisis deepened yet further.
Now with former Federal Reserve chief Janet Yellen confirmed as his Treasury Secretary, Biden is "committed to stopping China's economic abuses" said the White House.
The new President is also "very concerned" about last week's jailing of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, now spurring continued protests "
threatening to escalate into a larger movement against [Russian President-for-life Vladimir Putin's] Kremlin" according to the
Wall Street Journal.
"Clips calling for people to attend the protests and suggesting ways for them to deal with an arrest went viral on the TikTok video-sharing service," says the Kremlin-backed RT.com
The US-Russian New Start treaty signed when Biden was vice-president to Barack Obama in 2010
will expire next month, Biden also noted, meaning the 2 countries must "operate in mutual self-interest" over nuclear arms limitation even while discussing other sensitive issues, such as last year's massive hacking of US computer networks and claims that Moscow offered bounties to Taliban fighters for killing US soldiers in Afghanistan.
"Chinese gold imports in 2020 were significantly lower than the year before," says a note from the precious metals team at French bank and London bullion market maker BNP Paribas, reviewing the available data on bullion flows into the metal's No.1 mining and No.1 consumer country.
Gold bullion imports to China sank by 4/5ths last year on BNP's analysis, but "looking forward, there is a sense of optimism with regards to pent-up demand in 2021.
China's President Xi Jinping yesterday warned against "a new Cold War [that] will only push the world into division and even confrontation.
"We need to abandon ideological prejudice," said the Communist dictatorship's leader to the World Economic Forum of business leaders, lobbyists and economics ministers, "and jointly follow a path of peaceful coexistence, mutual benefit and win-win cooperation."
Gold's No.2 consumer nation, India today saw worsening violence between police and predominantly
Sikh farmers protesting against new agricultural commodity laws, causing the government to ask internet providers to suspend their service around the historic and symbolic Red Fort in New Delhi to try disrupting the "tractor rally".
Accusations of "vaccine nationalism" meantime grew after the European Union said it
may block exports of Covid inoculations made in the bloc if its own 27-member states don't first get the quantities ordered.
"Recovery is a little bit delayed but should not be derailed," said European Central Bank chief Christine Lagarde Monday, also speaking to the "virtual" World Economic Forum, usually held in the Swiss ski resort of Davos.
Beyond that "bridge" she went on, "the second [post-Covid] phase is a new economy that we are talking about...Both on the fiscal and monetary policy front,
authorities will have to stay the course and to continue support...for a new economy where scarring will hopefully be avoided or reduced."
"Will the UK really
refuse trade deals over human rights?" asks the BBC, contrasting Foreign Secretary Dominic Raab's call for UK firms to prove there is no slave labor in their supply chain – directly naming China's internment and work-camps for minority Uighur Muslims – with the almost £80bn per year of trade done between Britain and the world's No.2 economy.
Officials at the UK's Department for International Trade are meantime
reportedly advising businesses struggling to overcome the new "non-tariff barriers" to EU trade following Brexit on 31st December to register and operate a new company within the 27-nation bloc "as the only means to minimise the problems caused by the 'hard Brexit' deal" agreed by Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
