Forex news for Asia trading Thursday 10 January 2019

A funny old day. The FOMC minutes out during US time on Wednesday saw a weaker dollar that appeared likely to carry on here in Asia, but it was mixed indeed.

USD weakness:

  • USD/JPY and USD/CHF slid on the session here today, and EUR/USD gained.

USD strength:

  • USD/CAD ticked higher through to around 1.3240 before retracing around 50% of its move

Nothing much at all:

  • Cable kept relatively steady, down a tiny range and then back to little changed. NZD/USD a similar pattern

A bit of everything:

  • Meanwhile AUD lost ground in the earlier part of the day but more than recovered from lows circa 0.7150 to top out as I post just under 0.7190.

On the news front there was not much, what we did get through were comments from China's Ministry of Commerce on the US trade talks. These were little more than pro-forma, along the lines of 'we had talks' and have been interpreted as quite lukewarm and not giving too much encouragement. Of course the talks were fairly low level and would have been the wrong venue to expect agreement on the intractable issues still to be faced.

Data. The focus was on inflation (December 2018) from China. Both CPI and PPI came in under central estimates, the PPI was a very big miss indeed. A combination of lower commodity prices, less robust demand in the economy, and a weaker external sector. PPI was at its slowest increase since September 2016. AUD had been soft before the data and dipped further upon release, but as discussed above AUD/USD has recovered quite nicely for the session.

China's yuan continued to show strength, USD/CNY traded at its lowest since August last year. Gold gained a few dollars.

Daily USD/CNY

Still to come: