Asian shares rise, dollar weaker as US bill debate lingers; gold jumps
Global shares reached an intraday record on Monday on trade optimism, but a marathon debate in the Senate over a bill estimated to add $3.3 trillion to the United States' debt pile weighed on sentiment.
Japan's Nikkei (.N225), opens new tab gauge of shares sank as much as 1.1% as the yen climbed. Oil fell for a second consecutive session and gold advanced.
A vote on Trump's sweeping tax-cut and spending bill had been expected during the Asian trading day on Tuesday, but debate raged on over a long series of amendments by Republicans and the minority Democrats.
Trump wants the bill passed before the July 4 Independence Day holiday. As global trade negotiators scramble to get deals done before Trump's tariff deadlines, investors are also anticipating key U.S. labour market data on Thursday.
"Trade is front and centre this week, but alongside that, we've obviously got the fate of the 'One Big Beautiful Bill', which is currently being debated in the Senate," said Ray Attrill, head of FX strategy at the National Australia Bank.
Payrolls data later in the week "does have significant bearing, I think, on sentiment towards the potential timing of Fed rate cuts," he added in a podcast.
MSCI's broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan (.MIAPJ0000PUS), opens new tab was up 0.5%, led by South Korea's Kospi gauge (.KS11), opens new tab, rising 1.8%.
The dollar dropped 0.3% to 143.62 yen . The greenback slid 0.1% to $1.1794 against the European single currency and earlier touched $1.1798, the weakest since September 2021.
U.S. crude dipped 0.4% to $64.86 a barrel, weighed by expectations of an OPEC+ output hike in August. Spot gold rose 0.5% to $3,319.55 per ounce.
Pan-region Euro Stoxx 50 futures were up 0.1% at while German DAX futures were up 0.2%.
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The Guardian
18 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Shattered Lands by Sam Dalrymple review – the many partitions of southern Asia
Earlier this summer, amid renewed tensions between India and Pakistan following a terrorist attack in Indian-administered Kashmir, Donald Trump remarked that the two countries had been fighting over Kashmir for 'a thousand years'. It was a glib, ahistorical comment, and was widely ridiculed. Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple's urgent and ambitious debut, offers a more comprehensive rebuttal. Far from being a region riven by ancient hatreds, the lands that comprise modern India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar – as well as parts of the Gulf – were divided up within living memory from an empire in retreat. 'You can't actually see the Great Wall of China from space,' Dalrymple begins, 'but the border wall dividing India from Pakistan is unmistakable.' Stretching more than 3,000km and flanked by floodlights, thermal vision sensors and landmines, this is more a physical scar left by the hurried dismantling of British India than a traditional geopolitical divide. What might now seem like natural frontiers were shaped by five key events: Burma's exit from the empire in 1937; the separation of Aden that same year, and of the Gulf protectorates in 1947; the division of India and Pakistan, also in 1947; the absorption of more than 550 princely states; and, in 1971, the secession of East Pakistan. Neither ancient nor inevitable, these lines were hastily drawn in committee rooms, colonial offices and war cabinets. What makes Shattered Lands remarkable is not just the breadth of its archival reach or the linguistic range of its interviews (from Bengali to Burmese, Urdu to Konyak), but the way it reframes south Asia's history through the lens of disintegration. The son of acclaimed historian William Dalrymple, Sam nevertheless writes with a distinct sensibility. His work is shaped by a generational awareness of fractured identities, contested borders and the violence of nation-making. Where the elder Dalrymple has often chronicled the grandeur and decline of empires, the younger is more interested in how they splinter. And so, rather than treat the 1947 Partition as the singular rupture, Shattered Lands shows it to be one of many. The imperial map frayed gradually, and each unravelling left its own legacy of dispossession, nationalism and insurgency. Take Burma (now Mynamar), whose reconstitution as a crown colony in 1937 represented the first major partition of the Raj. Dismissed by many Indian elites as peripheral, Burma's separation was both strategic and symbolic. Gandhi, often invoked as a unifier, was among its supporters. 'I have no doubt in my mind that Burma cannot form part of India under swaraj [self rule],' he once wrote, aligning with the view of many Indian leaders who viewed India as Bharat, the sacred geography referred to in the epic Mahabharata, which excluded Burma and Arabia. Speaking to Rangoon's Gujarati community, Gandhi told them they were 'guests in a foreign country' despite many Burmese seeing themselves as Indian. That same year, as Burma and Aden were severed from the Indian Empire, the Congress party adopted Vande Mataram as India's national song. In equating the nation with the Hindu goddess Durga, it alienated Muslims such as Muhammad Ali Jinnah, who increasingly saw Congress as a vehicle for Hindu majoritarianism. The ideological groundwork for the creation of Pakistan was already being laid. Among the most poignant moments in the book is a brief account of a Bible salesman from the Naga hills who volunteers to fight in the second world war. The Nagas are ethnically Tibeto-Burman peoples native to the borderlands of north-east India and north-west Myanmar, with distinct cultural traditions and a strong sense of nationhood that long predates these modern states. When asked if he is Indian or Burmese, the man replies, 'I am a Naga first, a Naga second, and a Naga last.' The British system, designed to sort subjects into clear administrative categories, had no space for an affiliation that transcended colonial borders, and he was turned away. If there's a critique to be made, it's that Dalrymple's account remains largely anchored to the great men of history: viceroys, premiers, politicians, princely elites. While there are flickers of grassroots perspective – such as the Naga would-be soldier and Rohingya families from the borderlands – they often play a supporting role in a narrative shaped by those drawing the maps. Yet perhaps that is the point: these were top-down decisions, made in grand offices, whose human cost has still not fully been reckoned with. More significantly, Shattered Lands speaks powerfully to our present moment. At a time of widespread historical amnesia – when revisionist governments across south Asia are remaking textbooks and erasing inconvenient truths – this book reminds us how recent, contested and fragile these dividing lines are. The prose is vivid, the storytelling cinematic, and Dalrymple draws together forgotten archives from Aden to Assam. Above all, there is a refusal to mythologise, and instead a clear-eyed history that lays bare the possibilities foreclosed by the region's fragmentation. Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia by Sam Dalrymple is published by William Collins (£25). To support the Guardian, order your copy at Delivery charges may apply.
Economist
26 minutes ago
- Economist
How South Africa could harness Donald Trump's wrath
NO SAILOR LIKES a hurricane. But if the alternative is drifting in the doldrums without hope, even vicious gales have their uses. As South Africa is buffeted by criticism from President Donald Trump and other American conservatives—some of it unfair and pushed by bad-faith actors—centrist business and political leaders dream of riding that storm to hasten reforms.
The Guardian
28 minutes ago
- The Guardian
Cristiano Ronaldo's £492m Saudi deal: two cynical regimes form a strategic alliance
The winners of next season's AFC Champions League Two, Asia's second-tier club competition, will receive about £1.8m. The winners of the Saudi King's Cup will receive just over £1m. Prize money for the Saudi Pro League is not disclosed, but by the most recent available figures (for 2022-23) is in roughly the same area. Weekly attendances at the King Saud University Stadium, where top-tier ticket prices start at about £12, range between 10,000 and 25,000, although of course you also have to factor in pie and programme sales above that. And so you really have to applaud Al-Nassr's ambition in handing an estimated £492m to Cristiano Ronaldo over the next two years. Even if they sweep the board at domestic level, if they fight their way past Istiklol of Tajikistan's 1xBet Higher League and Al-Wehdat of the Jordanian Pro League, if they extract maximum value from merch and sponsorships, you still struggle to see how they can cover a basic salary that comes to £488,000 a day, even before the bonuses and blandishments that will push the total package well beyond that. According to reports, the deal also involves Ronaldo taking a 15% ownership stake in Al-Nassr, extra incentives for winning the Pro League or the Golden Boot, a private jet allowance, 16 full-time staff including two chefs and three gardeners, and a bonus for every time he successfully presses an opposition player. Last one was a joke, obvs. And amid the stultifying assault of numbers, Ronaldo's new contract – announced to great fanfare last week – marks a significant shift in the evolution of the superstar athlete, a further blurring of the lines between what we used to call 'sport' and what we used to call 'the other stuff'. The first question to put: what exactly is Saudi Arabia getting for its money? Because of course Al-Nassr are a majority fund-owned club, an arm of the Saudi state, which is funnelling untold riches into its domestic league free from the encumbrance of cost controls or financial fair play rules. Ronaldo himself is in effect a Saudi employee, albeit one who has enjoyed much better fortune then most migrant workers who have entered the country in recent years. On the pitch, Ronaldo's influence has been highly visible: 99 goals in 111 games under four coaches. Give him a half chance in a tight space and even at the age of 40, there are still few players you would back over him. At the same time Al-Nassr have won no major trophies since his arrival and the club's two other big attacking talents, Jhon Durán and Sadio Mané, have found themselves overshadowed to such an extent that both may leave this summer. Let's charitably describe this one as: jury out. In recent months there was talk of Ronaldo getting a short-term deal to play in the Club World Cup, a competition that would seem perfect for him: based entirely around celebrity power, influencer fame and a distinct lack of running. Politically and commercially, there was literally no reason for this not to happen. And so we can conclude that while many clubs were interested in his star wattage, none were prepared to pay the going rate to remould their entire system around a 40-year-old striker who lost his last half-yard of pace in about 2017. But of course these days what Ronaldo can do on a football pitch is but a fraction of his total appeal. In an age when power itself is being reimagined along the lines of social media clout, when the attention economy and the actual economy are rapidly converging into one and the same thing, the fact Ronaldo is the most followed person on Instagram – and the third-most followed on X behind Elon Musk and Barack Obama – matters. In a way Ronaldo's fame renders him a kind of one-man city state, an influencer first and an athlete second, his goals and assists entirely tangential to the eyeballs he can garner in the process. What we have, in essence, is the professional athlete reimagined as a kind of plutocratic demigod, able to construct entire new realities around themselves. One in which the 2034 World Cup in Saudi Arabia will be 'the most beautiful ever', or where the Saudi Pro League is 'one of the top five leagues in the world', as he recently put it. 'It's highly competitive, and those who don't know that simply haven't played here.' Fundamentally, this is not true on any measure: Opta ranks the Saudi Pro League as the world's 29th best. And of course by his own criteria, Ronaldo would have had to play in all the others in order to make a reasoned assessment. But when you have 659 million Instagram followers, perhaps whatever you say becomes true simply by saying it. Which is not to say the football is an irrelevance. Football is clearly still inherent to Ronaldo's self-image, albeit these days more as an adjunct to his power than as the source of it. Ronaldo still plays football in the same way that Donald Trump plays golf: as part of a broader cult of personality, something to get photographed doing, content for the feed. A branding exercise stripped entirely of context or objective judgment, complete with massaged numbers and a coterie of obedient applauding acolytes. As is the continuing fixation on his physique, the positioning of Ronaldo as a kind of Übermensch, a transcendent individual, a higher form of biology, albeit one that still possesses an unerring ability to put free-kicks straight into the wall. Sign up to Football Daily Kick off your evenings with the Guardian's take on the world of football after newsletter promotion And so Al-Nassr (and to a lesser extent the Portuguese national team) are no longer paying for Ronaldo the footballer. What they're buying is Ronaldo the spiritual leader, the attention machine, the aura, the abdominals, the soft-power influence. They're buying a place on his grid, the opportunity to allow one of the world's most famous men to do their bidding. Perhaps it helps to think of his new contract as a kind of trade deal, a strategic alliance between two cynical regimes drunk on their own power and with largely congruent social views. 'I belong to Saudi Arabia,' Ronaldo stated proudly on announcing his new contract last week. And of course many star athletes in many sports have succumbed to the lure of the Saudi riyal, and will continue to do so. But there is a tonal difference between taking the money of a rogue state and actively advocating for them on the broadest possible stage. For years we have spoken of Saudi investment as a kind of moral dilemma, a fine balance of pecuniary motives, reputational concerns and human rights. For Ronaldo, it is clear that no such dilemma exists. Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
