Hong Kong Double-Dip, Australia Puzzle, Singapore Spend: Eco Day

(Bloomberg) -- Welcome to Wednesday, Asia. Here’s the latest news and analysis from Bloomberg Economics to help get your day started:

• Hong Kong is heading for its first back-to-back annual recessions on record, as the coronavirus shutdown cripples an economy already battered by months of political unrest
• Australia’s central bank chief Philip Lowe and his U.S. counterpart Jerome Powell have both witnessed multi-year hiring surges. Yet Powell’s jobless rate has a 3 in front of it and Lowe’s a 5
• Singapore will post its biggest budget deficit since at least 1997, pledging S$6.4 billion ($4.6 billion) in dedicated support for an economy being slammed by the coronavirus outbreak
• The biggest question for the global economy right now is how quickly China can get back to anything like normal operations while it’s battling the coronavirus outbreak
• Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan says monetary policy is “roughly appropriate,” and he expects rates to remain on hold through 2020
• President Donald Trump cast doubts over the likelihood of an anticipated trade deal with India just days before a scheduled visit
• Euro-area finance ministers were presented with a fiscal policy document highlighting a lack of coordination, and the risk of a protracted economic malaise reminiscent of the one that befell Japan. Their response: silence
• Japanese banks must accelerate their preparation for the end of Libor to avoid possible damage to the financial sector and the wider economy, according to a senior Bank of Japan official who has seen the initial results of a key nationwide survey
• Brazil central bank President Roberto Campos Neto met with one of the country’s largest legislative caucuses to hammer home that it’s time to pass a long-awaited autonomy bill
• Boris Johnson’s “deep and abiding love for Australia,” born in the gap year he spent there, is inspiring the U.K. prime minister anew

To contact the reporter on this story: Michael Heath in Sydney at mheath1@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Paul Jackson at pjackson53@bloomberg.net, Alexandra Veroude

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