Vaccine news catapults investors’ economic-recovery bets

By Tom Westbrook, Lewis Krauskopf

SYDNEY/NEW YORK – News of an effective vaccine against the novel coronavirus is fuelling bets that a global economic recovery will buoy wide swaths of the market that have struggled under nearly nine months of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Pfizer said on Monday its experimental Covid-19 vaccine was more than 90 percent effective, a potentially major victory in the fight against a pandemic that has killed more than a million people, battered the world’s economy and upended daily life.

Pfizer and its German partner BioNTech expect to seek US authorisation this month for emergency use of the vaccine, raising the possibility of a regulatory decision as soon as December.

Investors piled into banks stocks, airlines and other economically sensitive companies that had been battered by months of coronavirus-led lockdowns and travel bans, pushing the Dow industrials and S&P 500 to fresh record highs, while havens such as gold and the Japanese yen sold off and the US Treasury yield curve steepened.

Source: iol.co.za