Market movers today
Financial markets in general, and the oil market in particular, will be monitoring the ramifications of Tropical Storm Harvey on South Texas where much of US energy production takes place. So far, it has led to the temporary shutdown of some oil and gas production as well as refinery production.
The most interesting data release today is the euro area loan growth in July. In 2017, loans to households have been rising at the fastest pace since 2009, confirming that the ECB’s accommodative monetary policy measures are filtering through to the real economy. We expect the July figure to report 2.7% y/y growth, up from 2.6% y/y in June. We also get data on M3 money supply growth and we expect the figure in July to have remained around 5.0%, as observed over the past three months.
In the UK, the third round of Brexit negotiations between the UK and the EU kicks off this week . The parties are set to continue negotiations in phase 1 (divorce bill, citizen’s rights and Irish border).
In Scandi markets, Swedish retail sales and trade balance data will be in focus today, see next page.
Later this week, the key data includes euro area inflation and unemployment. In the US, there are also some important releases including PCE inflation, the labour market report as well as ISM and PMI for the manufacturing sector. Chinese private and official manufacturing PMI will also be published.
Selected market news
The Jackson Hole monetary policy symposium turned out to provide basically no news regarding the next steps for monetary policy. Instead, Fed Chair Yellen and ECB President Draghi both used the opportunity to speak against the rollback of financial regulation and against protectionism. In the Q&A session, Draghi repeated the message from the July ECB meeting that a ‘significant degree of accommodation is still warranted’, suggesting that the reduction in stimuli will be done in baby steps. ‘Gradualism’ appear to be the new buzzword while ‘tapertantrum’ is what ECB wants to avoid. Despite the lack of new signals on monetary policy, the FX market reacted swiftly, sending EUR/USD above 1.19. BoJ’s Kuroda pledged to keep the accommodative monetary policy in place for some time.
Over the weekend, South Texas including Houston was hit by Tropical Storm Harvey, shutting down 300-500kb/d of production from the Eagle Ford oil field and further closing down some refinery production. In addition, there were reports out of Libya that production had been halted at two oil fields due to disruption by armed rebel groups. On Friday, the weekly US oil rig count data showed a fall to 759. This marks the second consecutive week of decline and thus signals to the oil market that downside risks for US product ion on a 6-12M horizon looks real. The news above has so far failed to spur a significant reaction in the oil market .
