Forex news for Asia trading Wednesday 3 August 20
- Bank of England meeting Thursday; "Look for a 25bp rate cut & £50bn of QE"
- Aussie PM Turnbull: Australian interest rates still relatively high
- North Korean missile test earlier - US, Japan responses
- Australia new vehicle sales in July -1.1% y/y
- Japan - Nikkei Services PMI 50.4 (prior 49.4) & Composite PMI: 50.1 (prior 49.0)
- China - Caixin PMIs: Services: 51.7 (prior 52.7) & Composite: 51.9 (prior 50.3)
- PBOC sets USD/CNY central rate at 6.6195 (vs. yesterday at 6.6451)
- New Zealand - ANZ Commodity Prices (July): 2.0% m/m (prior +3.7%)
- BOJ June meeting minutes - recap
- Japan - MoF's Asakawa says watching the nervous FX moves carefully
- ASB on the NZ employment data - need for further RBNZ OCR cuts
- BOJ Minutes (June meeting) released
- Australia - Services PMI (July): 53.9 (prior 51.3)
- UK think tank says economy to shrink this quarter, 50% chance of recession
- UK - BRC Shop Price Index for July: -1.6% y/y (prior -2.0%)
- Some NZ employment data for Q2
- In Belfast? Want to work in FX? 300 job vacancies coming up!
- Some contrary data on NZ house prices
- Here is the best day trader ever! Zero to 3.5m in 3 years!
- More from Atlanta Fed head Lockhart
- Trade ideas thread - Wednesday 3 August 2016
- RBNZ to journos - no early data for you!
- Private oil inventory data
- Fed's Lockhart: Need to see how Brexit plays out in medium term
USD/JPY gained steadily for much of the session, without much in the way of news. PM Abe has reshuffled his cabinet; he is expected to have brought in Kozo Yamamoto as a minister. Yamamoto is a staunch advocate of Abenomics, to the extent he has in the past advocated the BOJ underwrite government debt and setting the 2% inflation target into law. This may have been a factor in the yen selling today or maybe not.
Elsewhere we had EUR and CHF dribbling lower against the USD, cable losing a few points also but not big ranges for any of these.
NZD fell away following the partial employment data (the Household Labour Force Survey has been delayed until August 17, today we only got wage growth data and hours worked), with some AUD/NZD stop loss buying contributing the NZD selling.
AUD had a pop back above 0.7600 after an earlier loss of just a few points, with bids coming in below market from those who missed out on the buying the dip following the Reserve Bank of Australia announcement yesterday. As I update its barely changed on the session overall, dipping on some comments from Australian PM Turnbull saying he thought interest rates in Australia are still too high.
We had the PBOC setting the yuan at a higher mid rate value again today after a brief one-day devaluation yesterday, We also got services and composite PMIs from Caixin (the private survey PMI), with a dip for services and a gain for the composite on the month.
Regional equities:
- Nikkei -0.98%
- Shanghai +0.27%
- HK -1.68%
- ASX -1.07%
Still to come: Japan PM Abe to hold a press conference around 6.30pm Tokyo time (0930GMT)
As I post:
