PARIS (Reuters) – Renault’s (RENA.PA) shares fell on Wednesday after credit rating agency Moody’s cut its rating on the French carmaker’s debts to “junk” status.

Renault shares were down 2.3% to 30.2 euros ($32.71) in early trading, its lowest level since mid-2012, making it among the worst performing stocks on Paris’ benchmark CAC-40 .FCHI index.

Moody’s late on Tuesday cut its credit rating on Renault to Ba1 status after the company posted weak annual results.

On Feb 14, Renault reported its first loss in a decade and the company also cut its dividend.

“The downgrade to ‘Ba1’ was triggered by Renault’s substantially weakened operating performance reported for the year 2019 to a level no longer commensurate with the Baa3 rating category,” wrote Moody’s.

“Based on the company’s 2020 guidance anticipating a further decline in the group’s operating margin and the continuing weakness of the market environment, we do not expect that Renault will be able to restore healthy operating margin levels in the medium term,” the rating agency added.

Brokerage Jefferies also cut its share price target for Renault to 28 euros from 38 euros.

“Renault is set to remain income poor for a while,” wrote Jefferies, which kept an ‘underperform’ rating on the stock.

SHENZHEN, China (Reuters) – While coronavirus fears curtail much of China’s bustle, traders are getting back to business at the world’s largest electronics market, buying and selling from bags and suitcases on the streets outside their shut premises.

The Huaqiangbei area in the southern city of Shenzhen is home to dozens of multi-storey malls housing around 38,000 trading desks packed with reels of microchips, phone parts, and other components. The markets remain closed this week, with vendors uncertain of when formal business will resume.

But word traveled across groups on the WeChat messaging platform that some were doing business on the streets. By Tuesday afternoon, hundreds of traders had gathered.

“I think it’s pretty funny, and the atmosphere here is great,” said Xu Peng, a microchip trader in a crowd of about 30 traders outside one of the market buildings.

Many of the traders clutched bags full of electronic wares as they scanned their phones and waited for buyers or suppliers.

“This place is finally starting to wake up,” he said, before taking a supplier’s call.

Shenzhen is one of the cities hardest hit by the coronavirus outside of Hubei province, with over 400 confirmed cases. Many apartment blocks have banned visitors and require residents to obtain permission slips before going outside.

Yet so far, police have left the traders at Huaqiangbei alone. An employee at the local government department responsible for virus safety inspections said the traders were not breaking any rules.

Huaqiangbei acts as the major matching hub for companies across the world and the factories of southern Guangdong province. Many factories are closed and suppliers are unable to return to the market, worrying traders.

The virus outbreak is having a big impact, Cheng Weiling said through her facemask while checking her phone.

“Lots of people are still trapped in their hometowns and so lots of places can’t open,” she said.

Microchip and board trader Yi Liang agreed.

“There’s lots of demand, but some people just can’t get hold of the inventory,” he said.

Traders lose significant income while the shutdown continues, said Donny Zhang, CEO of Sand and Wave, a hardware consulting and sourcing company based in the Huaqiangbei area.

“A small counter might only be one meter wide in size, but their yearly revenue could be 10 million yuan ($1.43 million),” he said.

There are signs that China is starting to return to normal, with more traffic in major city streets this week than last. Over half of large-scale enterprises in Guangdong have returned to work, the provincial government said on Tuesday.

Feb 18 (Reuters) – A federal judge in Texas on Tuesday rejected Chinese telecommunications equipment maker Huawei Technologies’ constitutional challenge to a U.S. law that restricted its ability to do business with federal agencies and their contractors.

In a 57-page decision, U.S. District Judge Amos Mazzant ruled in favor of the United States, concluding that Congress acted within its powers by including the restriction in the National Defense Authorization Act, which also targeted Chinese company ZTE Corp.

There are plenty of signs of the strains China’s economy is coming under as a result of the coronavirus. The sharp fall in German business confidence is one because Europe’s biggest economy suffers when demand for its exports falls. The decision by Cathay Pacific, Hong Kong’s flag carrier airline, to cancel 40% of its flights in February and March is another.

But the best bellwether of what has been happening in China is Apple, which has warned that it is on course to miss its revenue forecasts in the first three months of 2020. China is a big market for Apple – accounting for about one-sixth of its global revenues – and is the source of most of its products. The coronavirus represents a demand and a supply shock to the company.

Apple’s statement to investors represented something of a reality check to the financial markets, which have been blithely assuming that the coronavirus would represent only a short-lived hit to China and to the wider global economy. To be sure, Apple says that production will return to normal but stresses that the process is taking longer than expected. This is far more serious than the outbreak of Sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome) and its timing could hardly have been worse.

Take a look at the world’s four biggest economies in reverse order. Germany flatlined in the final three months of 2019 – and that was even before the first cases of the coronavirus were detected in Wuhan. Japan, the third biggest economy, contracted at an annual rate of more than 6% in the fourth quarter of last year and is nailed on for a recession. China, number two on the list, was experiencing its slowest rate of expansion for three decades as a result of weaker demand, its trade war with the US and a deliberate attempt on the part of Beijing to go for lower but higher quality growth.

That just leaves the US, which has so far held up the best of the four. But the fact that the retail giant Walmart on Tuesday failed to meet Wall Street’s sales and profits expectations for late 2019 is an indication of how American consumers are seeing their spending power eroded by the higher cost of imported goods because of Donald Trump’s tariffs. Trade wars have consequences.

Bulls in the financial market have seen every dip in share prices as a buying opportunity, primarily because they are confident that the Federal Reserve and other central banks will step in and provide ample stimulus if things start to look grim. In the short-term, the bulls are right. In the long term, central banks will be legitimising reckless behaviour and risking the crash to end all crashes.

Higher wages at last?

Put out the bunting. Crack open the champagne. It is time to celebrate a milestone in history: the earnings of the average British worker are finally higher – adjusted for inflation – than they were at at the time of the previous peak. For those whose memories need jogging that was in early 2008, when Gordon Brown was prime minister and the world was gearing up for the Beijing Olympics.

No question, this has been the strangest period for the labour market in living memory. As a nation, the UK took a pay cut during the recession of 2008-09 rather than endure the mass unemployment it had seen in the past and has suffered a prolonged hit to real wages of a sort not seen for 200 years.

As the latest official figures show, Britain has the highest employment rate in its history, the lowest unemployment rate since the mid-1970s and yet the annual rate of earnings growth is coming down rather than going up, from 3.2% in November to 2.9% in December.

One theory is that this is just a temporary phenomenon and that wages will start rising more quickly now that the general election is out of the way and Britain has left the EU. April’s 6%-plus increase in the national minimum wage will affect about 10% of workers.

But in the past a labour market this tight would see earnings growing at an annual rate of 5% rather than 3%. So perhaps the labour market is not really as tight as it looks. Self-employment is driving employment growth and the number of zero-hour jobs is approaching the one million mark. That tells us something; work is casualised and less secure.