Global stocks sank Wednesday after US President Donald Trump said he was not satisfied with talks that are aimed at averting a trade war with China. Equities were also dented by poor eurozone economic data, and as Trump cast doubt on a planned summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un. “Trump (is) continuing to drive uncertainty over global trade,” said analyst Joshua Mahony at trading firm IG. “European markets are following their Asian counterparts lower, as a pessimistic tone from Trump is compounded by downbeat economic data,” he added. Markets had surged Monday after US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin and Chinese Vice Premier Liu He said they had agreed to pull back from imposing threatened tariffs on billions of dollars of goods, and continue talks on a variety of trade issues. However, Trump has declared that he was “not satisfied” with the status of the talks, fuelling worries that the world’s top two economies could still slug out an economically pain
Ethiopia’s new Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed paid a visit to a hotbed of anti-government protests Wednesday, asking residents for patience as he works to bring change to the country. Abiy is the first prime minister in modern Ethiopian history to come from the country’s largest ethnicity the Oromo, which took to the streets in late 2015 protesting the country’s one-party government. Those protests continued for months, leading to hundreds of deaths and tens of thousands of arrests in an unprecedented challenge to the 27-year rule of the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPRDF). Just over a week after his inauguration, Abiy addressed a crowd of thousands gathered in a stadium in Ambo, a town in the Oromo federal region Oromia that is a hotbed of protests and strikes. “We are now on the path of change and love,” Abiy told a mostly Oromo crowd that police struggled to keep from the bandstand where he was speaking. “We want to work hand-in-hand with you.