The Australian market is expected to open higher this morning, influenced by positive leads from overseas securities and commodities trading.
Wall Street rallied overnight after the US and Japanese central banks chose to keep interest rates low.
The US Senate also passed a key jobs bill which is seen as being the first in a series of bills designed to help bring unemployment down from its current level of 9.7%.
In economic news out of the US: The Producer Price Index, which measures of wholesale inflation, fell 0.6% in February after rising 1.4% in January. Core PPI, which strips out volatile food and energy prices, rose 0.1% in the month compared to a 0.3% rise in January.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average closed higher, up 48 points to 10,734. The S&P500 Index gained 7 points to 1,166 and the NASDAQ rose 11 points to 2,389.
European stock markets also closed in positive territory. London’s FTSE rose 24 points, Paris gained 19 points and Frankfurt was up 53 points.
Asian stocks were higher with Hong Kong’s Hang Seng gained 362 points, Tokyo’s Nikkei advanced 125 points and China’s Shanghai Composite rose 58 points.
The Australian sharemarket closed stronger yesterday. The S&P/ASX 200 Index finished 56 points higher to 4,853 and on the futures market the SPI200 is up 21 points. On to currencies: the Aussie Dollar at 8:50AM was buying 92.36 US cents, 60.3 Pence Sterling, 83.46 Yen and 67.25 Euro cents.
In local economic news: the Melbourne Institute releases its Household Saving and Investment Report for the March quarter, and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and Westpac issue their survey of industrial trends.
To company news around this morning: Telstra (ASX:TLS) shares closed slightly higher yesterday, up 0.64% to $3.13. The Federal Government's plans to force a breakup of Telstra have hit another hurdle. The Greens say their support for laws splitting Telstra was weakening due to lack of cooperation from the government. The Greens could potentially sink a key plank of the government's telecoms reform agenda in the Senate, which would split off Telstra's fixed-line network and use it to help build a $39 billion fast broadband network. Telstra shares have fallen steadily since the break-up plan was announced in September, but the stock has rallied in the past week on doubts that the government can get its Telstra break-up bill through the Senate. Telstra’s net profit climbed just over $4 billion in 2009.
BHP Billiton (ASX:BHP) shares closed 1.29% higher yesterday to $43.30. The Australian Tax Office has lost a $2.2 billion appeal against BHP Billiton. Yesterday the full Federal Court dismissed the Tax Office’s appeal against a Federal Court decision in April of last year which allowed BHP’s finance company to write off the $2.2 billion in bad loans made to two subsidiaries. One loan was for the ill-fated construction of a plant in Western Australia to produce briquettes from iron ore particles in a bid to turn them into a valuable product -- and to satisfy an obligation imposed by the WA government that BHP had to be involved in secondary processing of iron ore. Both BHP and the Tax Office have yet to comment. The Tax office is expected to try and appeal. BHP’s 2009 net profit was over $7.2 billion.
Among those companies going ex-dividend today are Challenger Financial Services with a 6 cent unfranked dividend, Corporate Express 12.5 cent fully franked, OrotonGroup 22 cent fully franked and Premium Investors 1.5 cent fully franked.
To commodities: Gold is up $1.80 at US$1,124.80 an ounce for the April contract on Comex. For the May contract silver gained 17 cents to US$17.50 and copper is up 5 cents at US$3.41.
And the price of oil is $1.23 higher to US$82.93 a barrel for April light crude in New York.
