Forex news for Asia trading Monday 2 September 2019

Further tariff impositions hit from both the US and China over the weekend. Protests in Hong Kong continued, as did the response of authorities there, and China ratcheted up the warnings. Brexit headlines continued, with little sign of compromise from any side. China PMIs came out over the weekend, a mixed bag of services performing in expansion while manufacturing remained in contraction. German elections saw a strong showing from populist parties but not enough to win. Argentina imposed currency controls, limiting buying of USD for pesos.

It was thus a nervous opening on Monday, mainly reflected in a >1% drop in US S&P500 emini futures. In forex the expected yen strength and AUD weakness was present in the early hours.

USD/JPY dropped early only to spend much of the session retracing, from lows under 106 it bounced towards 106.25, so the range was not large.

AUD/USD registered lows circa 0.6720 before its retrace to around 0.6735. NZD followed a similar pattern. Cable opened a touch weaker but is little changed from late Friday as I update. EUR/USD has more or less flat lined.

It was a packed session for data releases, all in the bullets above, the most notable being the private survey China manufacturing PMI coming in at an expansionary reading, quite opposite the poor official PMI released over the weekend.

Still to come:

Reminder - Its a US market holiday on Monday.

AUD/JPY today:

Forex news for Asia trading Monday 2 September 2019 e