The show goes on for Theresa May.

Key Movers

At yesterday's press conference Donald Trump stood next to President Putin and refused to blame Russia for meddling in the 2016 election, instead stating that ‘President Putin says it’s not Russia. I don’t see any reason why it would be’. At home this caused uproar.


There was an uptick in retail sales yesterday, key to the US economy as consumers play such a large part, however the US dollar struggled to match its performance of last week. Indeed EUR/USD has now picked back above the 1.17 IB handle. Jerome Powell is testifying once again in the Semiannual Monetary Policy meeting in front of the Senate Banking Committee. In his prepared statement last week, Powell indicated that he felt confident in the economy as well as wary about recent trade policies out of the White House. The market will be looking for further questions on the latter of these two topics to decipher how many more times the Fed will raise rates this year. Watch USD/JPY (the second most liquid currency pair) as it looks to hold onto it’s six month highs.


It was a very quiet start to the week for the Eurozone yesterday with little European economic data to talk of with only celebrations along the Champs Elyse interesting to watch. The steady week continues through until tomorrow with final CPI numbers. Despite this though the euro is benefitted from the dollar sell off yesterday and EUR/USD broke 1.17.


Despite increasing calls for the RBA to raise interest rates, once again the latest RBA minutes indicate it is in no rush to do so. As a slight concession it did indicate that if low unemployment and inflation pressures continued then the next move in rates would be upwards from 1.5%. There is a lot of support on GBP/AUD at 1.78 and the currency pair is oscillating between here and 1.7875.


Despite raising interest rates by 25bps last week, demand for the Canadian Dollar still remains muted and we are currently trading around the levels seen before the hike. The big issue for the Canadian economy remains trade tensions and Governor Poloz stated that they couldn’t factor this into policy as nothing is concrete still.


Inflation in New Zealand still struggles to break the 2% target level. It was the RBNZ that coined the notion of targeting 2% inflation levels, something that central banks across the globe have followed. This morning’s reading of 1.6% means that levels are still short however with core inflation hitting a seven year high (the RBNZ watch core inflation the closest) the NZD went on a surge.