Forex news for Asia trading Wednesday 10 December 2014
- Australia – Westpac Consumer Confidence Index for December: -5.7% m/m (prior was +1.9%)
- Fonterra sees lower China dairy consumption growth through 2020 vs previous forecast
- Japan PPI: -0.2 % m/m (vs. -0.3% expected)
- Japan Quarterly Business Sentiment Index (BSI) for Q4
- BCC – UK economy set for a strong 2015 … but premature rate hike is a huge risk
- Australian housing finance for October. Home loans: +0.3% m/m (vs. expected +0.1%)
- China – Economic Information Daily – Researcher says yuan won’t depreciate sharply
- Shanghai Securities News: Regulators may limit broker borrowing … negative impact on stocks
- China November CPI: 1.4% y/y (vs. +1.6% expected)
- “5 reasons why Chinese stocks are tanking”
- More from Fonterra: Sees 2016 payout at around NZ$6.25/kg
Still to come:
- RBNZ announcement due tomorrow morning in New Zealand – preview
- Japan election not far away now … the important numbers
Plenty of movement in Asia today.
EUR, GBP and CHF against the USD were not where most of the action was, but all had a little bit of a wiggle and end the session stronger against the USD, albeit not by much.
USD/JPY fell initially in the Tokyo morning but found support from 119.20 which took it higher to just shy of 120 before topping out. ‘Gotobi day’ was the word on a few lips, but this chatter dried up as the USD/JPY fell pretty much all the way back to its session lows and further down. Yen crosses followed a similar pattern.
Kiwi and AUD were movers, too, following similar patterns on the session. AUD/USD didn’t show much response to the very poor consumer sentiment data (see bullets, above), but did manage to fall away to test below 0.8270 heading into the China CPI and PPI data. Perhaps it was this data that showed continued PPI deflation and very low inflation igniting thoughts of Chinese stimulus which then sent the AUD steadily higher … though a simpler explanation is the fall in the USD/JPY at around the same time.
