Forex news for Asia trading Thursday 16 July 2020
- Head of South Korea's central bank says to buy government bonds if volatility rises
- China President Xi will provide supportive environment for business
- Australian PM Morrison says expects July jobs data to be worse due to reimposed lockdown
- China Industrial Production +4.8% y/y (expected 4.8%) Retail Sales -1.8% y/y (expected 0.5%)
- China GDP for Q2 comes in at +11.5% q/q (vs. expected at +9.6%)
- China new home prices for June +0.6% m/m and +4.9% y/y
- Australian employment change +210.8k (expected +100K) & Unemployment 7.4% (exp. 7.3%)
- Fourth major city in China announces tightened property buying rules to curb speculation
- PBOC sets USD/ CNY reference rate for today at 6.9913 (vs. yesterday at 6.9982 )
- FX option expiries for Thursday July 16 at the 10am NY cut
- Australian state of Victoria reports 317 new cases of COVID-19
- Australia consumer inflation expectations 3.2% vs. prior 3.3%
- Trump considering a ban on travel to the USs by members of the CCP (China)
- Coronavirus - Los Angeles County current hospitalizations record high for second day in row
- Responses to the NZ negative CPI print coming in - "need for further action from the RBNZ "
- Australia coronavirus outbreak - rumours persist of possible 'stage 4 ' lock down
- Morgan Stanley is expecting continued large-scale oil price volatility
- NZ CPI - inflation in New Zealand for Q2 -0.5% q/q (expected -0.6%)
- UK press with another bullish coronavirus vaccine story
- Trade ideas thread - Thursday 16 July 2020
- Texas coronavirus cases hit a new record high again, +10,791
- Fauci says will have an effective COVID-19 vaccine by the end of 2020
The Twitter hack (read from the bottom up:
- Twitter says most accounts can tweet again
- Twitter appears to have suspended accounts of the blue check mark people
- Twitter says it is aware of the 'security incident' hacked accounts
- Here is the list (so far) of the crypto hacked Twitter account
- For the bitcoin folks - Elon Musk twitter account hacked - he is NOT giving away free BTC
- A huge Twitter hack appears to be underway
A late in the US day report from the UK media (Telegraph) on a promising vaccine development was received with little warmth by risk markets, with barely any response. The report was replete with caveats on early results, to be confirmed and what have you but these reports usually are and it doesn't usually prove much of a hindrance to taking markets up. This was not the case today though, risk currencies and equities did basically nothing on the report.
Later in the session selling hit after a New York Times report on Trump's administration considering a 'sweeping' ban on travel to the US by Chinese Communist Party members and families. Flows were prompted into the USD with currencies down a little on this.
It was a big day for data,
- Australian jobs were a mixed bag with jobs up for a bit of a bounce back but the unemployment rate climbing also,
- Chinese GDP for Q2 came in at a whopping beat,
- while Chinese activity data for June was mixed also - manufacturing continues to improve while retail slumped further.
Chinese stocks responded lower, currencies extended their falls a touch.
Also of note today, Japanese investors sold 3.6tln yen of overseas stocks last week.
In the crypto space we had a large-scale hack of Twitter to scam people into sending coins with the promises of easy riches. It worked, albeit at a small scale.
More on all of these in the bullets above. Example scam tweet below (edited to remove the account to send the BTC to!
