Forex news for Asia trading for Tuesday 20 April 2021
- Goldman Sachs' 3 reasons not to be bullish USD/JPY
- Chinese President Xi is speaking - must reject cold-war mentality
- RBA April monetary policy meeting minutes - says unemployment too high
- PBOC sets China's 1-year loan prime rate at 3.85%, 5-year at 4.65%. Both are unchanged and as expected.
- PBOC sets USD/ CNY central rate at 6.5103 (vs. yesterday at 6.5233)
- Japan's economy minister says he feels a sense of crisis over virus spread
- BOJ Kuroda says yet again it'll take time to hit the 2% inflation target
- PayPal to launch local wallet in China focused on cross-border payments
- US expresses deep concerns re Russia's plans to block parts of the Black Sea
- China has suspended imports from a US seafood exporter for a week
- Texas police will serve search warrants on Tesla for data from death crash car
- South Korea's Vice Finance monitoring markets - can't rule out market frenzy
- Australia weekly consumer confidence: 114.0 (prior 114.1)
- Bank of Canada meeting Wednesday 21 April, preview
- More on the Bank of Japan considering slashing this fiscal year's inflation forecast
- Canadian province (BC) to do random roadside checks to enforce coronavirus travel restrictions
- UK media report that "Russia 'planning large-scale warship assault on Ukraine water supplies'"
- Elon Musk says on death crash Tesla - full self-driving feature not purchased for that car
- White House issues a statement saying infrastructure talks were fruitful
- NZD traders - heads up for the GDT dairy auction coming up Tuesday
- Trade ideas thread - Tuesday 20 April 2021
The Australian, Canadian and New Zealand dollars all traded higher against the US dollar during the session, easily outperforming. More murmurings of commodity price gains did the rounds assisting these currencies higher.
USD/JPY had an early move down, it took out a few stop loss sells down as low as just under 108.00 before rebounding to above 108.30 (briefly).
EUR and GBP are very little changed for the day.
The inflow of new information during the session was focused, one, on China's Loan Prime Rate setting,
- both the 1- and 5-year remained unchanged, for the 12th consecutive month, at 3.85% and 4.65% respectively, as expected for both.
And, secondly, on the Reserve Bank of Australia monetary policy April meeting minutes.
- The minutes indicate little change in the RBA view ahead, the Bank reiterated their twin targets (inflation and unemployment) are still yet to be achieved, are unlikely to be so prior to 2024, and policy will remain easy until then. There was an oblique hint that the RBA's Term Funding Facility would be wound back from June this year.
Bitcoin dropped a little further, its below US$54K as I post.
Regional equities:
Japan's Nikkei -1.8%, Topix -1.2%
China's Shanghai Composite -0.04%
Hong Kong's Hang Seng -0.2%
Australia's S&P/ASX 200 -0.32%
