Month: October 2023

A rout in government bond markets deepened on Wednesday with U.S. yields reaching their highest in 16 years, souring appetite for riskier assets as investors bet that interest rates will remain persistently high, boding ill for the world economy.

The U.S. Treasury 10-year yield rose 6.9 basis points (bps) to 4.872%, its highest since 2007, after climbing nearly a dozen bps on Tuesday’s job openings data that pointed to resilience in the U.S. economy.

Thirty-year Treasury yields rose above 5% for the first time since August 2007, just before the global financial crisis.

European bonds followed suit, with yields on Germany’s benchmark 10-year debt rising above 3% for the first time since 2011. The country’s 30-year yield climbed to its latest 12-year high.

Even Japan’s 10-year yield , which is capped by the Bank of Japan (BOJ), rose 4.5 bps to a decade high despite the BOJ offering to buy $4.5 billion worth of bonds on Wednesday.

Australian, Canadian and British government bond yields have also surged this week.

“It’s a very difficult market,” said Sandrine Perret, multi-asset portfolio manager at Unigestion.

“It is all back to yields, that’s the main driver of markets. The pivot that most investors were expecting in September has not come yet – that’s the big driver of all market pricing at the moment.”

The moves in bond markets sucked money from all corners into dollars.

Still, the dollar , measured against a basket of currencies, eased 0.3%, helping European stocks (.STOXX) turn positive after losing as much as 0.6%. Asian shares sank to 11-month lows.

The MSCI world equity index (.MIWD00000PUS), which tracks shares in 47 countries, fell 0.2%. On Wall Street, S&P 500 futures eked out gains of 0.1% after earlier trading down 0.5%.

Earlier, MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan (.MIAPJ0000PUS) had fallen 1%, its second straight daily drop of over 1%.

U.S. yields in real terms – subtracting inflation – are also at almost 15-year highs, in part because their move has not come with much of a shift in market gauges of inflation expectations.

“With the risk-free rate so high, it’s not really compelling for people to allocate away from short-term cash-like investments,” said Mel Siew, a portfolio manager at Muzinich & Co in Singapore.

The yen was just on the stronger side of 150 per dollar on Wednesday, after an unexpected but short-lived surge in the previous session stoked speculation that Japanese authorities may have intervened to support the currency.

The Japanese currency had breached the 150-per-dollar level on Tuesday before suddenly shooting to 147.3. There was no confirmation from Tokyo, where Japan’s finance minister and top currency diplomat have made no direct comment on the move.

The yen last stood at 149.10 per dollar.

The dollar’s march pushed the euro to its lowest in 10 months at $1.0448 overnight and sterling to a seven-month trough at $1.20535.

The euro last traded at $1.05, up 0.3% on the day. The pound was up a similar amount at $1.212.

“For now, the FX market is a bystander,” said SocGen strategist Kit Juckes, “watching Treasuries and waiting for them to break something.”

Federal Reserve officials see rising yields on long-term U.S. Treasury debt as not triggering alarm bells yet.

In commodity markets, the firm dollar has helped put the brakes on oil prices and higher yields have weighed on gold.

Brent crude oil futures were down 1.7% to $89.38 a barrel. U.S. West Texas Intermediate crude fell 1.8% to $87.67 per barrel.

Related Galleries:

Futures tracking Wall Street’s main indexes were muted on Wednesday as investors awaited more data for clues on the state of the labor market, while a relentless rally in long-term U.S. Treasury yields kept markets on edge.

Adding to investor anxiety was the ouster of Speaker Kevin McCarthy by some Republicans in the House of Representatives just days after the government narrowly averted a shutdown.

While the 30-year Treasury yield crossed above 5% for the first time since August 2007, the 10-year and five-year yields hit their highest since 2007.

Megacap growth stocks including Microsoft (MSFT.O), Meta Platforms (META.O), Nvidia (NVDA.O) and Tesla (TSLA.O) were down about 0.2% each in premarket trading, with Apple (AAPL.O) shedding 0.9% following a KeyBanc downgrade to “sector weight” from “overweight”.

At 7:06 a.m. ET, Dow e-minis were up 9 points, or 0.03%, S&P 500 e-minis were up 0.5 point, or 0.01%, and Nasdaq 100 e-minis were down 5 points, or 0.03%.

The CBOE volatility index (.VIX), Wall Street’s “fear gauge”, briefly hit a five-month high and topped its long-term average of 20.

A day after U.S. job openings unexpectedly rose in August, investors will closely monitor September ADP National Employment data at 8:15 a.m. ET and non-farm payrolls data on Friday for more clues about a fairly resilient labor market.

“Markets had become overly confident in pricing a rapid easing of the Federal Reserve’s monetary policy,” said UBS Global Wealth Management’s Chief Investment Officer Mark Haefele, who expects near-term choppy and range-bound trading in equity markets.

On the political front, Haefele noted, “Absent a new House speaker, no action can be taken on bills, from routine matters to the funding of the federal government … increasing the risk of a government shutdown in late November.”

The Institute for Supply Management’s non-manufacturing Purchasing Managers’ Index, S&P Global’s final composite and services PMI surveys, factory orders and remarks by Fed policymakers including Chicago President Austan Goolsbee and Board Governor Michelle Bowman will also be monitored during the day.

Traders’ bets of at least another 25-basis point interest rate hike in November and December stood at 29% and 44%, respectively, according to CME’s FedWatch tool.

All three major U.S. stock indexes ended more than 1% lower on Tuesday, with the Dow (.DJI) turning negative on a year-to-date basis for the first time since June.

Chipmaker Intel (INTC.O) gained 1.9% on Wednesday on plans to operate its programmable chip unit as a standalone business and hold a public offering for stock in the business over the next two to three years.

Eli Lilly (LLY.N) said the head of its diabetes and obesity division, Mike Mason, will retire by the end of the year. The drugmaker’s shares fell 1%.

An Iranian teenaged girl is in critical condition in hospital, two prominent rights activists told Reuters on Wednesday, after falling into a coma following what they said was a confrontation with agents in the Tehran metro for violating the hijab law.

Armita Geravand’s case is highly sensitive, raising concerns the 16-year-old might face the same fate as Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old woman whose death in a coma last year in the custody of morality police sparked months of nationwide protest.

While authorities have denied claims by rights groups that Geravand went into a coma on Sunday after a confrontation with officers enforcing the Islamic dress code, Iranian-Kurdish rights group Hengaw posted her picture unconscious at a Tehran hospital where she was taken after the incident.

There was no immediate response from Iran’s interior ministry to a request for comment about the incident.

“We are following her case closely. She is in coma at Intensive Care Unit of the hospital and her condition is critical … her relatives said there is a heavy presence of plain clothes at the hospital,” one of the activists in Iran said.

The second activist said security forces had forbidden Geravand’s parents from posting her picture on social media or from talking to human rights groups.

The activists spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.

CCTV footage, shared on IRNA, showed Geravand without mandatory hijab accompanied by two female friends walking toward the train from the metro platform. Upon entering the cabin, one of the girls is seen immediately backing off and reaching for the ground, before another girl is dragged unconscious from the cabin by passengers.

Reuters could not immediately verify the authenticity of the footage.

The head of the Tehran Metro Operating Company, Masoud Dorosti, told IRNA the CCTV footage showed no sign of verbal or physical conflict between passengers or company employees.

An Iranian journalist was briefly arrested on Monday when she went to the hospital to inquire about Geravand’s situation, Iranian media reported.

“Iranian security institutions have said her condition was caused by low pressure – an oft-repeated scenario from such institutions,” Iran-based rights group Dadban said on social media.

In a video posted on the state news agency IRNA, her parents said that their daughter had suffered a drop in blood pressure, lost her balance, and hit her head inside the metro cabin.

“I think my daughter’s blood pressure dropped, I am not too sure, I think they have said her pressure dropped,” her mother said. But she added that there was no point in creating controversy.

Rights groups on social media have called on authorities to publish the footage from inside the cabin, claiming that her parents’ statement was made under duress.

Germany’s Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on social media platform X said: “Once again a young woman in #Iran is fighting for her life. Just because she showed her hair in the subway. It is unbearable. The parents of #ArmitaGarawand do not belong in front of cameras, but have the right to be at their daughter’s bedside.”

(This story has been refiled to remove picture)

Karabakh: Azerbaijan rejects the EU’s invitation to talks with Armenia mediated in Granada Read the news on Agenzia Nova

This year’s Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be announced Wednesday in the Swedish capital of Stockholm. 

The announcement will be made by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, which awarded the Physics prize Tuesday to three nuclear scientists for their individual experiments in “exploring the world of electrons inside atoms and molecules.”

The academy said Pierre Agostini, Ferenc Krausz and Anne L’Huillier “have demonstrated a way to create extremely short pulses of light that can be used to measure the rapid processes in which electrons move or change energy.”

The 2022 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was shared by Americans Carolyn R. Bertozzi and Barry Sharpless and Morten Meldal of Denmark for their work in advancing the field of so-called click chemistry, described by the academy as a functional and simple form of chemistry “in which molecular building blocks snap together quickly and efficiently.”

The Nobel announcements began Monday with the prize in Medicine going to Hungary’s Kataline Kariko and Drew Weissman of the United States for their joint research that led to the rapid development of the mRNA COVID vaccines.

The recipients of the literature and peace prizes will be announced Thursday and Friday, respectively, with the final prize for economic sciences to be announced next Monday.

All the categories except economics were established in the will of 19th century Swedish businessman Alfred Nobel, who made a fortune with his invention of dynamite.

The first Nobel Prizes were awarded in 1901, five years after his death.

The economics prize was established in 1968 by Sweden’s central bank Sveriges Riksbank in Nobel’s memory, with the first laureates, Norway’s Ragnar Frisch and Jan Tinbergen of the Netherlands, announced the next year.

Threat actors exploited an open redirection vulnerability in the job search platform Indeed to carry out phishing attacks.

Researchers from the cybersecurity firm Menlo Security reported that threat actors exploited an open redirection vulnerability in the job search platform Indeed in phishing attacks.

The phishing attacks were aimed at senior executives across various industries, primarily in Banking, Financial, Insurance, Property Management and Real Estate, and Manufacturing sectors.

The campaign was observed between July and August, threat actors used the phishing kit ‘EvilProxy.’ EvilProxy actors are using Reverse Proxy and Cookie Injection methods to bypass 2FA authentication – proxyfying victim’s session.

The attackers exploited the open redirection vulnerability on “indeed.com” to redirect victims to phishing pages impersonating Microsoft.

The fake Microsoft Online login page is deployed with the EvilProxy framework fetching all the content dynamically from the legitimate login site.

The phishing site acts as a reverse proxy, proxying the request to the actual website. Thereat actors are able to intercept the legitimate server’s requests & responses and steal the session cookies. Then the cookies are used by the attackers to login to take over the victims’ account on the legitimate Microsoft Online site, bypassing non-phishing resistant MFA.

“In this specific attack, the user clicks on a URL believing that they are being directed to indeed.com or another of its subdomains. The subdomain ‘t.indeed.com’ is supplied with parameters to redirect the client to another target (example.com) as shown in the example below.” states the report from Menlo Security. “The parameters in the URL that follow the “?” are a combination of parameters unique to indeed.com and the target parameter whose argument consists of the destination URL. Hence the user upon clicking the URL ends up getting redirected to example.com. In an actual attack, the user would be redirected to a phishing page.”

The attackers used the subdomain ‘lmo.’ and hosted the phishing pages on nginx servers that were used as reverse proxies.

“The phishing pages were found to be hosted on nginx servers capable of acting as a reverse proxy. The reverse proxy fetches all the content that can be dynamically generated like the login pages and then acts as the adversary in the middle by intercepting the requests and responses between the victim and the legitimate site.” continues the report. “This helps in harvesting the session cookies and this tactic can be attributed to the usage of EvilProxy Phishing kit.”

Menlo Security shared its findings with Indeed, the researchers conclude that there is a high probability that we can see a surge in the usage of ‘EvilProxy.’

Follow me on Twitter: @securityaffairs and Facebook and Mastodon

Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, phishing)

The post Phishing campaign targeted US executives exploiting a flaw in Indeed job search platform appeared first on Security Affairs.

Sweden’s Royal Academy of Sciences on Wednesday inadvertently published names of three scientists it said had won this year’s Nobel Prize in chemistry, although the award-giving institute said the decision was still hours away.

“The Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2023 rewards the discovery and development of quantum dots, nanoparticles that are so small that their size determines their properties,” the academy wrote in an email according to Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter (DN).

Johan Aqvist, chair of the academy’s Nobel committee for chemistry, however told Reuters:

“It is a mistake by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. Our meeting starts at 0930 CET (0730 GMT) so no decision has been made yet. The winners have not been selected.”

The announcement of this year’s Nobel prize for chemistry is due at 1145 CET (0945 GMT).

Daily Aftonbladet published a copy of the academy’s email naming the laureates as Moungi G. Bawendi, Louise E. Brus and Alexei I. Ekimov.

The more than century-old prize is awarded by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences and is worth 11 million Swedish crowns ($990,019).

($1 = 11.1109 Swedish crowns)

Thailand will take steps to enhance the safety of foreign tourists, official said on Wednesday, a day after a teenager shot dead two people, including a Chinese visitor, inside a popular shopping mall in downtown Bangkok.

Tourism Minister Sudawan Wangsuphakijkosol stressed the shooting at Siam Paragon mall in the capital city was “an isolated incident.” However, law enforcement agencies will tighten weapons screening at shopping malls and other tourist spots, she said. 

[time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”]

The Chinese national, a 34-year-old woman, and a Myanmar citizen working at the mall, were shot dead by the 14-year-old boy. The shooter, who was nabbed by the police, was previously treated for mental illness and had skipped taking medication, according to police chief Torsak Sukvimol. Five people were injured, including another Chinese citizen.

Read More: Revenge Travel May Be a Big Problem for Places Like Thailand’s Famous Maya Bay

The shooting casts a shadow on Thailand’s expectations for a surge in foreign tourist arrivals under a visa-free program for visitors from China and Kazakhstan. The Southeast Asian nation, popular for its beaches, Buddhist temples and national parks, is forecast to receive up to 30 million holidaymakers this year, more than double the tally in 2022.

Thailand is counting on tourists to power an economic recovery this year as it grapples with headwinds from a decline in exports and higher interest rates. Chinese tourists were the largest group of visitors to the country before the pandemic, accounting for about 28% of the record 40 million foreign arrivals in 2019. 

Watching Fallout

The fallout from the shooting on tourism needs to be watched, Bank of Thailand Governor Sethaput Suthiwartnarueput said Wednesday, adding the industry had recovered to 60-70% of its pre-Covid levels.

“The shooting will hurt confidence of tourists and sentiment,” said Burin Adulwattana, chief economist at Bangkok-based Kasikorn Research Center. It also “increases downside risk to Thailand’s fragile economic recovery. The government will need to try its best to restore confidence.”

Shares of hotel, shopping mall operators and airlines fell in Bangkok trading, dragging the SET Tourism & Leisure Index to a one-year low. Central Plaza Hotel Pcl dropped as much as 8.5%, leading decline among the hotels, while mall operator Central Pattana Pcl fell as much as 2.8%. Asia Aviation Pcl lost as much as 4.5% and Airports of Thailand Pcl slid as much as 3.6%.

The Tourism Authority of Thailand and other agencies will also step up their communications strategy to ease concerns among travelers and improve Thailand’s image as a safe tourism destination, officials said at a briefing on Wednesday.

Read More: An Ex-Cop Is Behind Thailand’s Deadliest Mass Shooting. Now, the Country Is Asking Questions

While mass shootings are not very common in Thailand, a former cop used an automatic weapon to fire at a daycare center in northeastern Thailand last year, killing 36 people, mostly preschoolers. Since then, the government has ordered a crackdown on unlicensed gun owners and compulsory registration of all firearms.