Wary China Consumer, U.S. Recovery Hit, Global Outlook: Eco Day

(Bloomberg) -- Welcome to Tuesday, Asia. Here’s the latest news and analysis from Bloomberg Economics to help you start the day:

• Three months after China started to emerge from its coronavirus restrictions, its army of shoppers that help power the global economy are still nervous of travel, reticent to spend and forming habits that may change the face of consumption permanently
• An unprecedented increase in new Covid-19 cases is slowing the pace of the U.S. economy’s recovery from the pandemic
• Covid-19 increasingly appears all-consuming, with some major economies facing an unchecked outbreak. Meanwhile those that have bent the curve are meanwhile discovering that in an interconnected global economy, no one recovers till everyone does, as Bloomberg Economics’ global forecasts show
• The Trump administration rejected China’s expansive maritime claims in the South China Sea, reversing a previous policy of not taking sides in such disputes
• German Chancellor Angela Merkel showed a united front with Italy’s Giuseppe Conte days ahead of a crucial EU summit, warning that EU leaders need to deliver a “massive” recovery response
• The U.K. can’t inflate away its burgeoning debt pile in the way it has done in the past, the man chosen by the Treasury to head up its fiscal watchdog said
• Dozens of millionaires from the U.S. and six other countries have a message for their governments: “Tax us. Tax us. Tax us”
• The U.S. posted its worst-ever budget deficit in June as federal government spending more than tripled from a year earlier in a bid to mitigate the economic destruction caused by the pandemic
• Top advisers to President Donald Trump have ruled out undermining the Hong Kong dollar’s peg to the greenback as they seek to punish China for infringing on the territory’s political freedoms
• Just as the U.S. outlined a new round of tariffs on about $1.3 billion of French goods including makeup and handbags in the nations’ battle over digital taxes, evidence is mounting that the strategy has all sorts of costs for the American economy
• U.S. central bankers should take the jobs gap for minorities into account when weighing if the economy warrants tighter monetary policy, said Dallas Fed President Robert Kaplan
• The pandemic is encouraging a low-taxing country to build a welfare state
• Hunger and malnourishment are increasing around the world as the coronavirus crisis pushes more people into poverty and limits access to healthy diets, according to the UN
• Although India saw a record jump in its tally of coronavirus cases over the weekend, attention was on Amitabh Bachchan, the country’s biggest movie star, who is now among the 849,000 infected

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