After the NY close came the Eurogroup news conference, with Rehn, Juncker and Lagarde all making statements, all of which were tending soothing and positive (as you would expect) but did, nevertheless display some disagreements:
- Juncker says Eurogroup sees revised fiscal targets for Greece as appropriate and finance ministers to meet again Nov. 20
- Lagarde – additional work to be done on debt sustainability analysis of Greece in coming days
What was most telling, though, was the response of the EUR. Despite the EUR/USD being on two-week lows, it couldn’t rally on these comforting statements, and sure enough as the Asian markets arrived in the EUR/USD began falling. As befits the current Asian markets, the fall was not hard, but it gently lost 30 points and goes into early Europe on the day’s lows.
- Ahead of today’s CPI and PPI out of the UK we got the RICS House Price Balance, at -7 vs. -14 for the (upward revised) previous month; prices fell at their slowest pace in more than two years.
- In Australia the Nat. Aust. Bank released October’s Business Confidence at -1 (vs. zero for Sept.) and Business Conditions (-5 vs -3 prior).
- The AUD ticked a little lower on these poor figures and could not recover any ground, steadily eroding for the rest of the day from 1.0425 to below 1.0400
- There was a lunchtime speech from Jonathon Kearns, head of the RBA’s economic analysis unit, he said that recent rate cuts are beginning to have an effect on the economy. (& also commnets on housing here).
Which brings us to today’s most extreme mover (OK, that’s a relative term) … which, believe it or not was USD/JPY. In early Tokyo morning USD/JPY put on a bit of a spurt to just above 79.60 before spending the balance of the session tracking back to its lows and then through them, going into early Europe at 79.30. Figures out of Japan today continued to confirm an awful picture, Japanese Final Industrial Output for Septmeber coming in confirmed at -4.1pct, while Cpacity Utilization worsened from an expected -2.6% to -5.5%.
