Forex news for Asia trading Monday 1 December 2014
Weekend:
- Tough to draw conclusions about the economy from online sales data
- Black Friday sales were lower – ShopperTrak
- US National Retail Federation says Thanksgiving spending down
- UK’s Osborne to use bank fines to boost health care
- ECB’s Lautenschlaeger sees little room for further monetary easing
- Swiss gold referendum vote fails
- SNB ‘pleased’ with referendum, will take further measures ‘immediately’ if required
Monday:
- RBNZ’s Wheeler: Says inflation targeting remains appropriate
- Australian government to lower assumed iron ore price to $60/ton
- New Zealand terms of trade for Q3: -4.4% q/q (-4.5% expected)
- Kyodo news Japan: 90% of LDP candidates favour nuclear restart
- Moody’s: ECB cut to Greek bank haircuts a credit positive
- Australia – AIG Performance of Manufacturing index for November: 50.1 (prior was 49.4)
- Australia – TD Securities/Melbourne Institute (MI) Inflation Gauge for November 0.1 % m/m (prior was 0.2%)
- Japan Q3 Capital spending +5.5% y/y (vs. +2.0% expected)
- Australia – Company profit and inventories data
- China manufacturing PMI data for November: 50.3 (expected 50.5)
- New Zealand Treasury: Export receipts may be weaker than forecast
- JAPAN – Markit/JMMA Manufacturing PMI for November: 52.0 (prior was 52.4)
- China – HSBC manufacturing PMI: 50.0 (vs. flash of 50.0)
I’m doing my bit for the planet today, recycling Friday’s headline to this post … I just added gold to it. Says it all really, another flush lower for commodities and commodity currencies (CAD lower as well). After the morning losses we did some stabilsation, with some sideways movement now as I type.
Cable lost ground on the session, too – down more than 50 points from its highs at one stage.
EUR/USD was more restrained, trading in a tight range and overall not much direction for it.
USD/JPY ground it out higher again, getting very briefly above 119.00 and then tracking sideways just below.
The big news today was of course the result from Swiss gold referendum on Sunday – which saw a resoundingly strong result for the ‘No’ side. The polls had been saying for a while the ‘Yes’ case would fail and they were to be proved correct this time.
Chinese data today was a little on the soft side, the manufacturing PMIs 9both the official and HSBC versions) coming in lower than the prior month.
In Japan we got Q3 capex data which showed up surprisingly well – a good positive for the next round of GDP figures and perhaps indicating a good bounce out of the recession is ahead.
