市场消息

MOSCOW (Reuters) – Russia would be prepared to consider new proposals from the United States to replace a suspended Cold War-era nuclear pact with a broader treaty that includes more countries, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said on Thursday.

Russia suspended the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty at the weekend after Washington announced it would withdraw in six months unless Russia ends what it says are violations of the pact, allegations rejected by Moscow.

URENA, Venezuela/CUCUTA, Colombia (Reuters) – Desperate Venezuelans asked on Wednesday how they would gain access to U.S. food and medicine aid due to arrive via the Colombia border after President Nicolas Maduro’s government blocked the frontier crossing to any humanitarian shipments.

Despite widespread hunger and shortages of staple goods in Venezuela, Maduro vowed to turn back U.S. aid after President Donald Trump’s administration last month recognized opposition leader Juan Guaido as the rightful interim ruler of the South American nation.

Venezuelan security forces blocked the three-lane border crossing from the Colombian town of Cucuta on Tuesday using two shipping containers and a fuel tanker. Armed Venezuelan soldiers stood guard at the customs building, pledging to turn back any attempt to cross the border.

U.S. officials told Reuters aid was on its way this week.

Colombian and U.S. authorities have remained silent on how they plan to distribute the aid without Maduro’s approval.

Shipments are also due to come from Venezuelan companies abroad, Colombia, Canada and Germany.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The House Intelligence Committee is set to pursue a wide investigation into attempts to influence the 2016 U.S. presidential election, including a look at Donald Trump’s financial transactions, the panel’s Democratic chairman Adam Schiff said on Wednesday.

A day after the Republican president warned Democrats against “ridiculous partisan investigations” in his annual State of the Union address, Schiff said they would not be intimidated.

“We’re going to do our proper oversight,” he told reporters after the intelligence panel’s first meeting, which was closed.

The committee voted to provide transcripts of testimony it took behind closed doors in its probe of Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election to the special counsel for use in any prosecutions, something Schiff promised to do last month after a second Trump associate was charged with lying to Congress.

Schiff has said that an area of particular interest related to investigations of Trump are allegations that Russians might possess financial leverage over him.

Trump, asked about Schiff’s comments at a White House appearance, retorted: “Under what basis would he do that? He has no basis to do that. He’s just a political hack. … There would be no reason to do that.”

LONDON (Reuters) – A $2 billion effort by China’s Huawei to address security issues raised in a British government report last year will take between three and five years to produce results, according to a company letter to British lawmakers seen by Reuters

BERLIN (Reuters) – The German cabinet will hold a secret session on Wednesday to discuss safeguard measures regarding the possible participation of China’s Huawei Technologies in building Germany’s 5G network, the daily Handelsblatt said, citing government sources.

Huawei faces international scrutiny over its ties with the Chinese government and suspicion that Beijing could use Huawei’s technology for spying, which the company denies.

Wednesday’s meeting will focus on whether a security catalog, prepared by the Federal Network Agency and the cyber defense agency (BSI), along with certification rules and a no-spy agreement with China, will be enough to ensure future 5G mobile networks are safe, the paper said.

The session, to be held after the regular cabinet meeting, and attended by the German foreign, interior, economy, finance, and transport ministers, will discuss measures proposed last week by Deutsche Telekom to safeguard national security, the paper said.

On Tuesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel said Germany needed guarantees that Huawei would not hand over data to the Chinese state before the telecoms equipment supplier can participate in building its 5G network.

TOKYO/SYDNEY (Reuters) – Asian shares were subdued on Wednesday after U.S. President Donald Trump’s State of the Union address failed to give markets fresh trading catalysts, while the Australian dollar nosedived after the central bank opened the door to a possible rate cut.

Spread-betters expect London’s FTSE and Frankfurt’s DAX to respectively drop 0.2 percent and 0.1 percent when they open, while seeing a slightly larger fall for Paris’s CAC.

MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan was barely changed with China and several other markets in the region still closed for the Lunar New Year holiday. The range in which the index traded was limited to just 0.80 points, the narrowest since Dec. 25 last year.

Australian shares gained 0.3 percent, rising for the third session, while Japan’s Nikkei closed up 0.1 percent. E-Mini futures for the S&P 500 last were a tad higher.

The Australian dollar shed nearly 1.3 percent to hit a one week low of $0.71435, putting it on course for its biggest intraday drop in more than five months.

The sharp selloff in the Aussie came after Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) Governor Philip Lowe said the bank remained optimistic about the local economic outlook but acknowledged rates might fall if unemployment were to rise and inflation stay too low.

GENEVA (Reuters) – The United States supports “dictators, butchers and extremists” in the Middle East, Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif said in a Twitter post Wednesday in a response to U.S. President Donald Trump’s State of the Union speech.

Tensions have ramped up between Iran and the United States since Trump pulled out of a multilateral nuclear deal last May and reimposed sanctions on the Islamic Republic.

“US hostility has led it to support dictators, butchers & extremists, who’ve only brought ruin to our region,” Zarif wrote in the Twitter post.

Trump called Iran “the world’s leading state sponsor of terror” during his speech and said his administration had acted decisively to confront it, according to a video of the speech posted on the official White House website.

“It is a radical regime. They do bad, bad things,” Trump said. “We will not avert our eyes from a regime that chants ‘death to America’ and threatens genocide against the Jewish people.”

Top Iranian officials, including President Hassan Rouhani, have said that the Islamic Republic is facing its toughest economic situation in 40 years, at least partially due to the U.S. sanctions.

LONDON (Reuters) – Iran dismissed European Union criticism of its missile program, regional policies and rights record on Tuesday, highlighting their increasingly testy relationship as both sides seek to salvage a troubled nuclear deal.

Iran’s comments came a day after the bloc criticized the Islamic Republic’s ballistic missile tests and expressed concern at Iran’s role in growing Middle East tensions.

The European Union has promised to abide by a 2015 nuclear deal under which Iran agreed to limit its atomic work in exchange for sanctions relief, even after U.S. President Donald Trump abandoned the accord because it did not cover Iranian military activities.

The EU has stepped up criticism of Iran’s ballistic missiles program and its regional policies in a dual-track approach analysts say is designed to show Washington it is possible to contain Tehran while remaining inside the nuclear pact.

The Iranian foreign ministry said on Tuesday Iran would never negotiate over its missile program, which it said was defensive and designed as a deterrent.

UNITED NATIONS/WASHINGTON (Reuters) – North Korea is working to ensure its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities cannot be destroyed by military strikes, U.N. monitors said ahead of a meeting between U.S. and North Korean officials to prepare a second denuclearization summit.

The U.S. special envoy for North Korea, Stephen Biegun, will meet his North Korean counterpart on Wednesday in Pyongyang to prepare for a summit later this month between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the U.S. State Department said on Monday.Biegun has said he hoped the meeting with new North Korean counterpart Kim Hyok Chol would map out “a set of concrete deliverables” for the summit between Trump and Kim Jong Un.

Biegun, who held talks with South Korean officials in Seoul on Sunday and Monday, said he would be aiming for “a roadmap of negotiations and declarations going forward, and a shared understanding of the desired outcomes of our joint efforts”.

South Korean officials said they and the United States could be looking at a compromise that could expedite North Korea’s denuclearization – the dismantling of the North’s main Yongbyon nuclear complex, which could be reciprocated by U.S. measures including formally ending the 1950-53 Korean War and setting up a liaison office.

But U.N. sanctions monitors said in a confidential report, submitted to a 15-member U.N. Security Council sanctions committee and seen by Reuters on Monday, that they had “found evidence of a consistent trend on the part of the DPRK to disperse its assembly, storage and testing locations”, using the abbreviation for North Korea’s official name, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.