The
USD swung
in small ranges against major forex rates today. USD/JPY kicked off
with a pop towards 137.35 before subsiding back to unchanged. Its in
the middle of its day’s range as I update. We had a Bank of Japan
speaker today who basically repeated Bank of Japan Governor Kuroda’s
talking points. Key to these is the BOJ expects inflation to fall in
the middle of the next fiscal year (which begins April 1 2023)
without wage-price inflation kicking in. The BOJ is not expecting
wages to drive inflation.
After
USD/JPY hit its session high and began to drop back the USD lost
ground against other majors. Ranges were lacklustre and the move has
mainly retraced to leave little change pretty much across the board.
On
the data front, we had Chinese trade data for November, disappointing. As I pointed out numerous times, though, with moves afoot in
China to dial back restrictions economic data coming out now is more
stale than usual. Economic activity should pick up in China in the
months ahead. It may be a bumpy road, but trend improvement should be
seen.
From
Australia we had economic growth data for Q3, GDP missed a touch.
There is more in the bullets above.
Earlier
this week I posted to the effect that some key announcements were
expected from China today on easing COVID restrictions. So far we
have had reports out of a Chinese Communist Party Politburo meeting
held on December 6. But the reports were all generic sort of stuff
that did not provide much detail. As I post its still only midday or
so in China (as an aside China only has only
one
official
time zone, right across the breadth of the county, unofficially
the far west uses China Standard Time minus 2 hours though)
so there well be more to come.
Equities
in the Asia-Pacific region traded mixed today so far. Japan’s
Nikkei is down, HK is up (barely), Shanghai is down.
Pic via timeanddate.com
