Asia Summary and Highlights 9 Feb
Bank of Japan Governor Ueda says chances are high of accommodative conditions to stay
ANZ are expecting the RBNZ to hike its cash rate in February and in April, to 6%
Asia Session
Following Uchida's remark on Thursday, Ueda also speak in front of the parliament saying chances are high of accommodative conditions to stay, another "dovish" headline literally. Japan Chief Cabinet Secretary Hayashi tried to walk back the impact by stating the comment remains the same in the December one. While market participants who keep a close eye will release it is not really a dovish tilt, broad market participants are leaning towards the "dovishness" and see JPY further weakens on Friday despite JGB yields outperform U.S. T-yields. USD/JPY is trading 0.1% higher at 149.44, inching closer to 150 figure.
ANZ are expecting the RBNZ to hike its cash rate in February and in April, to 6%. The coming RBNZ meeting on Feb 28 should see them keeping rates on hold as we have not seen a revision in inflation nor OCR forecast from previous RBNZ meeting, nor spike in latest inflation data. NZD/USD jumped 0.4% to 0.6121, AUD/USD is unchanged for the session with the Chinese equity market closed to observe the Lunar New Year, while USD/CAD rose 0.05% as oil slips 30 cents. Elsewhere, EUR/USD is down 0.06% and GBP/USD is down 0.02%.
North American session
Not much FX movement through the North American session USD/JPY extended gains slightly to a high of 149.48, following a broadly as expected dip in jobless claims data, but otherwise the USD was generally a little softer. EUR/USD rose 10 pips to 1.0775, and USD/CAD dropped around 25 pips to 1.3465, with CAD outperforming the AUD as AUD/USD sustained a move below .65. EUR/GBP was not much changed despite speeches from MPC hawk Mann and dove Dhingra.