Market roundup: Dow +0.20% to 13534. S&P +0.11% to 1472. Gold -0.09% to $1682.30 London–0.15%. Germany –0.69%. France –0.29%.
The World Bank forecast that global gross domestic product will inch up 2.4 per cent this year, from 2.3 per cent in 2012. In its last forecast in June, the bank projected global growth would reach 3.0 per cent in 2013. Will the new growth approximations have an impact on the roaring markets? (ET)
Axis Bank Ltd [stockquote]AXISBANK[/stockquote] did well in the December quarter, with its net interest income rising by 16.6% over the year-ago period. Some analysts had expected growth of 12-13%, primarily because of a high base effect. After IT its now time for our banks to shine. HDFCBANK and IDBI results expected by end of this week. (MINT)
India’s antitrust body has sought more details on the acquisition of United Spirits Ltd (USL) by Diageo Plc to make sure that the merger doesn’t create a monopoly. [stockquote]USL[/stockquote] controls over half of India’s 250 million cases liquor market and owns brands such as McDowell’s No.1 and Bagpiper. Mr. Mallya will have to wait for a bit more to see the deal through. (MINT)
SEBI has proposed allowing gold exchange-traded funds to park up to 20% of their gold holdings with commercial banks against 100% maintained currently. The suggestion is in line with a similar proposal made by the RBI recently to put the gold corpus of ETFs to productive use and, thereby, curb India’s huge gold imports. Let’s wait to see how this impacts performance of various GOLD ETF’s like [[stockquote]GOLDBEES[/stockquote], [stockquote]KOTAKGOLD[/stockquote] etc. (ET)
How is Facebook’s new search tool (Graph search) going to fare with Google’s long standing search engine? Mark Zuckerberg unveiled a feature to help its users search for people and places within the social network, in the first major product launch event since company’s IPO in May last year. Will it be a decisive factor in the competition amongst the two? (MINT)
