With the passage of the US coronavirus relief bill through the Senate yesterday that particular headline risk item is out of the way.
The House vote is not expected until Friday US time, so markets in Asia today will have a breather from this. Expectations are the bill will be supported on a bipartisan basis and sail through the House. On the monetary policy side the Fed has taken the sting out of the impact for US dollars, the surge in demand for USD has abated somewhat with a follow through lessening of strains in financial markets. It not all fixed, but better.
The known unknowns ahead are the data, but Asia time zone economic data is certainly not where the focus is right now. Keep an eye out for unknown unknowns.
Coming up for those interested:
2100 GMT New Zealand - ANZ Consumer Confidence Index for March
- prior was down 0.5% to 122.1
- While there is no expectations survey conducted for this it seems not unreasonable to expect a drop great than the previous month given a kick up in concern about COVID-19 during March in NZ.
2330 GMT Tokyo inflation data for March - Tokyo area CPI (national level CPI for the month follows in three weeks)
- Tokyo CPI y/y, expected 0.3%, prior was 0.4%
- Tokyo CPI y/y excluding Fresh Food, expected 0.4%, prior was 0.5%
- Tokyo CPI excluding Food, Energy y/y, expected 0.6%, prior was 0.7%
- Inflation figures were given a boost by the October 2019 sales tax hike, this is still feeding through
0110 GMT Bank of Japan Japanese Government Bond purchase operation
in the 1-3, 3-5, 5-10 years left until maturity window
0130 GMT China Industrial Profits YTD for February
- No survey of expectations for this one. There was a broad scale shut down of the Chinese economy after lunar new year.
