Morning Briefing: Markets remain focused on geopolitics

Markets remain focused on geopolitics

The risk of continued unrest in the Middle East and North Korea are concerning the markets right now. Action taken by the US on Syria and potential action against North Korea are in focus Tuesday.

US production levels are putting downward pressure on oil prices while the geopolitical tension is boosting gold.

Most Asian indexes closed lower with Shanghai and Sydney outperforming their peers; the latter following a positive reading from the RBA’s business confidence survey.

European markets are also trending lower with lower German manufacturing data among the issues. London’s FTSE is higher following a hold-steady on inflation and other mixed data.

Wall Street and Toronto are expected to open lower.
 

	Latest	1 month ago	1 year ago
North America (previous session)
US Dow Jones	20,658.02 (-0.01 per cent)	-1.17 per cent	+17.67 per cent
TSX Composite	15,730.79 (+0.41 per cent)	+1.45 per cent	+17.19 per cent
Europe (at 5.00am ET)
UK FTSE	7,382.20 (+0.45 per cent)	+0.53 per cent	+19.07 per cent
German DAX	12,180.49 (-0.16 per cent)	+1.82 per cent	+25.79 per cent
Asia (at close)
China CSI 300	3,516.89 (+0.32 per cent)	+2.60 per cent	+8.88 per cent
Japan Nikkei	18,747.87 (-0.27 per cent)	-4.37 per cent	+19.03 per cent
Other Data (at 5.00am ET)
Oil (Brent)	Oil (WTI)	Gold	Can. Dollar
55.85 (-0.23 per cent)	52.93 (-0.28 per cent)	1257.80 (+0.31 per cent)	U$0.7506
			Aus. Dollar
			U$0.7503

Don’t moan about taxes, we’re actually doing OK

There are few places in the world where people are happy with their tax bills but it seems that Canadians are doing considerably better than many other countries in that respect.

A report from the OECD ranks 37 countries based on taxes paid by single workers with no children and Canada is in the bottom half of the list.

A single Canadian worker without children typically pays 31 per cent of their income in tax, putting the country in 26th place, just behind the
US at 32 per cent, the same as the UK, but 2 percentage points higher than Australia.

For the lowest tax of the 37, Mexico (20 per cent), New Zealand (18 per cent) or Chile (7 per cent) are the best options.

Belgium (54 per cent), Germany (49 per cent) and Hungary, France and Italy (48 per cent) take the most.

The OECD average is 36 per cent.