Forex and Bitcoin news for Asia trading Friday 3 August 2018

Currency ranges were disappointing in Asia apart from the yuan which did the rock thing (drop like a). The People's Bank of China set a lower reference rate for the onshore yuan against the USD, taking it back again to May 2017 lows. Offshore yuan had weakened going into the daily setting and both onshore and offshore followed through with a further declines.

If there were implications for other currencies they were difficult to spot, its been a session of small ranges. GBP had sold off overnight after the Bank of England hiked interest rates but follow through here was minuscule to non-existent.

EUR, AUD, NZD, CHF are all little changed.

USD/CAD is a few tics down while USD/JPY is unchanged after a 15-od point pop to above 111.75 and a retrace since. The BOJ conducted its scheduled JGB buying operation today for amounts unchanged from their prior.

Data today, we got some services PMIs (Australia, China, Japan) with the market pretty much ignoring them, as usual. Australian retail sales data came in at a beat but ditto on the market not showing much response. Goldman Sachs were out with an update for their RBA forecast, now looking for a hike in November 2019 (GS had been forecasting a hike in November of this year) citing the housing market off the boil and slower than expected pressures for a higher inflation rate.

Just a heads up on EUR/USD, it has managed to drag itself off the floor for the past two months or so on Friday's. This may be in response to participants reducing exposure ahead of the potential for a weekend tweet or two from you-know-who. Note that today the US President has taken off for a 10-day holiday, although he has probably got his phone with him ;-).

Still to come:

Coming up for the US today is the much-awaited (as always) jobs report.