World markets themes for the week ahead

FOLLOWING are big themes likely to dominate thinking of investors and traders in the coming week and the Reuters stories related to them. Third time lucky? May-be

If at first you don’t succeed, try and try again. And again and again. The UK Parliament has voted to extend the March 29 exit date but Prime Minister Theresa May is still hoping to railroad lawmakers into approving the EU divorce deal she’s negotiated.

The unpopular agreement has already been heavily rejected twice but prospects of a long delay or even another referendum that may reverse Brexit could well swing eurosceptic Tories over to her side.

So a third “meaningful” vote, dubbed MV3, is planned for the coming week. If that fails, well, MV4 is already being touted.

There is, of course, no guarantee an exasperated EU will play ball — all 27 remaining members have to agree the extension. And there are doubts a three-month delay will break the deadlock.

If MV3 fails, the EU’s March 21 summit will be key, first to see if it agrees an extension and second, whether it presses Britain for a delay of one year or more.

With the parliamentary votes, meaningful or otherwise, grabbing the limelight, there’s probably not much the Bank of England can add at its meeting on March 21.

It’s already said no-deal Brexit is a bad idea; any clarity on its policy intentions is likely only after the manner and timing of Brexit becomes evident. Figure it out Boeing

President Trump has told Boeing to “figure it out fast”. That’s probably good advice for the company, a long-standing stock market darling that’s lost almost US$28 billion, or 13 per cent of its value, since the March 10 Ethiopian Airlines’ crash.

The disaster has prompted country after country into grounding Boeing’s fleet of 737 MAX aircraft - the model involved in the Ethiopian crash and another recent one in Indonesia.

Possible links between the accidents have rocked the aviation industry, scared passengers worldwide, and left the company scrambling to prove the safety of its best-selling model that was intended to be the standard for decades.

Before the crash, Boeing was the seventh most valued stock on the Dow Jones, but it’s fallen to 14th. Its shares hit record highs just a week before the crash, having risen a stunning 52 per cent since the end of December. They are still up almost 20 per cent year-to-date.

So what’s next? Moody’s reckons Boeing will overcome the nearterm challenges. The question for investors is whether the share price slide takes into account the damage to the bottom line and potential legal exposure.

Analysts will be assessing the possible fallout; chances are, some earnings downgrades will start coming through. Searching for meaning

To many economists, the Bank of Japan’s forecasts have long seemed to be on the optimistic side. The key difference in views was the global outlook. Well, the world economy is slowing down and even if Japanese companies are awash with cash and no major central bank runs a looser policy than the BOJ, the No.3 economy is still feeling the pinch.

What’s worse, inflation encounters less resistance on the downside than it does on the upside. So the BOJ is well and truly in a corner.

There was little it could do at its March meeting save keeping policy unchanged and tempering its economic outlook predictions. But might the BOJ be forced to resort to further policy easing?