Market movers today
Today is the big PMI manufacturing day. We have the preliminary November prints for euro area and the US already, but today will get the final prints. More exciting perhaps are the same indices for Italy, Sweden, the UK, Norway and Sweden.
In the US, we will also get the ISM manufacturing index for November, which we estimate fell to 58.0 from 58.7 in line with some of the regional PMIs and the fall in the US Markit PMI manufacturing index. We are still puzzled about the big gap between the Markit and ISM indices, as they are expected to show the same thing (more or less).
As the US Senate did not vote for the tax bill overnight, a vote could take place later today.
In Norway, the unemployment rate for November is due out today. We estimate an unchanged print of 2.4%.
Selected market news
In China, the Caixin manufacturing PMI dropped to 50.8 in November down from 51.0 in October and thus signals a slight slowdown in Chinese economic activity. The reading, however, differs from the official manufacturing PMI released yesterday, which showed a small increase from October to November. The copper price dropped slightly on the release.
OPEC+ yesterday agreed to extend output cuts by 9M to the end of 2018, and Libya and Nigeria agreed to freeze output at the 2017 high. This was about as expected by the market, but the announcement of a review of the deal in June next year left the market disappointed, causing oil prices to sell off. The market is concerned that OPEC+ has created a back door for exiting production cuts when the deal is set to be reviewed.
In the US, the next Senate vote on the tax bill has been postponed until later today. In addition, the Trump administration is also getting attention over a suggestion that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson could be replaced by Mike Pompeo. These factors are likely to have weighed somewhat on the USD yesterday.
