10 things you need to know in markets today
Oil is still fighting to break the $50 mark. After losses in trading on Thursday, the price of both crude benchmarks is on the rise again. Around 6:45 a.m. BST (1:45 a.m. ET) Brent crude, the international benchmark is trading 0.7% higher at $49.15, while WTI is up a similar margin to trade near parity at $49.12.
Deutsche Bank shareholders just rejected a pay deal for the company's executives. The German bank has become the latest big company to be hit by investor anger about executive pay after shareholders voted down its new salary plan for top managers. In a non-binding vote at Deutsche's annual meeting in Frankfurt, 51.9% of shareholders voted against the scheme, the Financial Times reports.
Saudi Arabia could be about to issue its first international bonds. According to people familiar with the situation, cited by the Financial Times, the oil rich Gulf state has instructed several international banks to start preparing for the possibility of a sovereign debt issuance, and sounding out buyers.
The Egyptian economy is getting crushed by the impact of oil and geopolitics. "Egypt ... looks vulnerable and a period of weaker remittances and, potentially, less official financing, will add to fears over the country's balance of payments position," argued Capital Economics' Jason Tuvey in a recent research note.
It is a fairly quiet day of data in Europe. On Friday morning, the highlight of the economic data calendar is the announcement of the state of the eurozone's current account. We'll also get a reading on German producer prices.
Rogue trader Jerome Kerviel is suing Societe Generale. In French court on Thursday, Kerviel sued the bank for 5.7 billion euros, according to Gaspard Sebag at Bloomberg. Litigation has been ongoing for eight years between Kerviel and his former employer, over bad bets he made on stock market futures.
Tesla Motors just raised nearly $1.5 billion in new funding. The carmaker has raised $1.46 billion in fresh capital from the sale of its 6.8 million new common stock offering, according to IFR. Tesla seeks to finance a plan to expand production of its electric vehicles to 500,000 a year by 2018.
The wreckage from EgyptAir Flight MS80, which crashed heading from Paris to Cairo early Thursday morning, has still not been found. Greek officials initially said they had located pieces of plastic and two life jackets in the Mediterranean Sea, near where a transponder signal from the plane was emitted sometime before it fell off the radar, but that information turned out to be wrong.
Taiwan has sworn in its first woman president, Tsai Ing-wen. Tsai's Democratic Progressive Party, which has traditionally favored independence from China, takes over after eight years under China-friendly Nationalist Ma Ying-jeou.
The probability of Britain voting to leave the European Union on June 23 is currently less than 20%, according to polling analyst Matt Singh Singh is the only person who correctly predicted a Conservative majority in last year's UK general election.