| All eyes on US jobs data, Apple risks dropping below its $3 trillion market value and China's central bank says it will increase funding support for the private sector. — David Goodman It's non-farm payrolls day in the US and figures are forecast to show employers added 200,000 jobs in July. While that would be the weakest print since the end of 2020, it's still strong historically and a number exceeding that may fuel bets on more Fed hikes. The report comes at a time when the mood is rapidly souring in the world's bond market, raising the stakes before the data. A surge in long-term yields to their highest since November has seen the Treasury market shed all its gains for 2023, crushing hopes for a rebound from last year's record 12.5% loss. The move has spilled over to bond markets from Europe to Asia Pacific as traders pull back bets on the world's biggest economy falling into recession. Apple's market value is set to dip below the historic $3 trillion level after the iPhone maker's outlook for the fourth quarter sparked worries over tepid demand for its handsets and other gadgets. The firm posted its third straight quarter of declining sales and predicted a similar performance in the current period, hurt by an industrywide slump that has sapped demand for phones, computers and tablets. After the company reported a revenue decline of 1.4% in the fiscal third quarter, Chief Financial Officer Luca Maestri said on a conference call that Apple's performance would be similar this period. An additional drop would mark the longest streak of declines in two decades — a startling slowdown for the world's most valuable company. China's central bank said it would increase funding support for the private sector after newly appointed Governor Pan Gongsheng met with executives from the property industry, identifying several companies by name in a statement that underscores growing urgency among regulators to boost market confidence. The meeting is the latest in a series of attempts by regulators across China's government to shore up the private sector as the country's economic recovery sputters and stress in some corners of the bond market increases. Reviving the property market would be key to boosting growth, with the Communist Party's Politburo last week signaling a shift toward looser policies for the sector. Stocks gained and Treasuries fluctuated before the jobs data. Contracts for the S&P 500 and Nasdaq 100 indexes both rose, setting US stocks on course to trim their biggest weekly decline since March.
Europe's Stoxx 600 index posted a modest advance as travel and leisure shares outperformed. European natural gas headed for the biggest weekly gain since June. The all-important payrolls report drops at 8:30 a.m. Aside from the 200,000 headline estimate, economists also predicts growth in hourly earnings to tick lower, and the unemployment rate to hold at 3.6%. Here's what caught our eye over the past 24 hours: Fitch Ratings' surprise move to strip US government debt of its top-tier rating this week sparked passionate criticism from Washington and Wall Street alike, with Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen deriding the downgrade as "arbitrary." But to David Beers, former head of S&P Global Ratings' sovereign debt scoring committee and one of the analysts behind the controversial ratings cut in 2011, it's an important reminder that the US isn't entitled to the top grade. "The underlying fiscal position and underlying debt trajectory has picked up pace," Beers, who is now a senior fellow at the Center For Financial Stability, told Romaine Bostick and I on Bloomberg Television. "AAA is the top rating any rating agency can assign, but of course, the US and any other sovereign that's being rated has no god-given or automatic right to that." Fitch's move comes nearly 12 years to the day since S&P shocked markets by dropping the US one level to AA+ from AAA for the first time in history, a move helmed by Beers and John Chambers. Their reasoning more than a decade ago sounded startlingly similar to Fitch's logic this week: ballooning US deficits and political dysfunction. Though May's debt-ceiling drama ended with an as-expected last-minute deal, repeated debt-limit clashes and eleventh-hour resolutions have eroded confidence in the nation's fiscal management. For Beers, it's a bit of a victory lap. S&P has yet to reverse the downgrade, and many of the issues flagged by the rating firm back in 2011 have only escalated since. If anything, other agencies have been a bit meek, he said. "It's fair to say that the rating agencies, based on their own criteria, have been pretty timid in their actions," he said. "If anything, Fitch's action is simply confirming what S&P decided back in 2011, and here we are in 2023." Follow Bloomberg's Katie Greifeld on Twitter @kgreifeld | 
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