A brief review the Week

Lots of things happened this week. German football team left the World Cup, the Chinese stock market has fallen to a bear market territory, Foxconn opened its factory in Wisconsin in the US, Japan reported a historically low unemployment, the world stock market stabilised by the end of the week. These are the highlights of the week; and of course, many other things also happened during this week.

This week is a week that people see increasing uncertainties caused by the international trading environment shift. The US president is continuing his previous threats of imposing high tariffs on imports from its allies and China. In addition, within the EU, Brexit is keeping the European economy as well as the politics facing increasing uncertainties that even within the UK conservative party there is no agreement on what Brexit should look like. Th current UK Prime Minister, May, is in danger of being overthrown by her own party due to the disagreement on the issue of Brexit negotiation. Meanwhile, China is trying to be the new world leader and expand its influence and show its openness to the rest of the world while the US seems to withdraw itself from the global matters. China has reduced the number of industrial sectors closed to foreign investment and been trying to build good relationship, especially trade relationship, with the European countries. In addition, China continues to build its long term project, 'One Belt One Road' and helps many developing countries in Asia as well as Africa to build their infrastructure , such as railways, harbours and roads in order to build up a new world trade network with China as the centre.

Although the uncertainty seems increasing, the market seems to stabilize towards the end of the week. This could be caused by the Friday effect, as people are going to have their weekend and feel happy, so they act much less negatively in the market, the sell-offs happen less frequently and investors may feel more optimistic due to their weekend mood. In addition, nothing surprising has happened on Friday yet, this certainly has helped the market stabilize.