Market movers today
Today is a relatively quiet day ahead of the important day tomorrow, with the Norges Bank meeting, ECB meeting and preliminary PMIs.
In Sweden, the ‘small’ prospera inflation expectations survey is due.
In the euro area, the consumer confidence indicator for January is due out at 16:00 CET.
Selected market news
The US equity markets struggled yesterday given the uncertainty over trade talks between the US and China and this morning a number of the Asian equity markets have followed the negative sentiment from the US, although losses has been modest. 10Y US Treasury yields fell a few basis points yesterday. Hence, the flight to safe assets is still there.
As expected, the Bank of Japan kept its QQE with yield curve control and its forward guidance unchanged at a meeting ending this morning. At the same time, it cut the inflation outlook significantly by 0.5pp in the fiscal year (Apr-Mar) 2019. The growth outlook was also cut but only for the current fiscal year whereas the FY 2019 and FY 2020 forecasts were revised slightly upwards. On the recent global development, the BoJ kept the sentence ‘overseas economies have continued to grow firmly on the whole’. This highlights that the BoJ expects the current global slowdown to be temporary and the recent weak Japanese export figures to bounce back once a trade agreement has been reached between the US and China.
