Market movers today
The main focus starting this week is whether the sharp sell-off in both bond markets and equity markets continues on the back of the ‘inflation scare’ flaring up in markets.
On the global agenda today, ECB’s Weidman speaks in Fran kfurt at 10.00CET. The final Euro PMI service indices with more country details are released at 10.00CET followed by Euro area retail sales at 11.00CET.
US ISM non-manufacturing at 16.00CET will give more insights into the strength of the US service sector.
Rest of the week Fed speeches and Bank of England meeting are the key things to watch. The Fed speeches will be particularly interesting following the job report Friday showing higher wage growth.
In Scandi , attention today turns to Norwegian housing prices at 11.00CET. Rest of the week Norwegian inflation and GDP numbers and Swedish industrial orders/ production and household consumption are the main economic figures in focus.
Selected market news
Service PMIs released for China and Japan overnight both came out stronger than expected showing healthy expansion in service sector activity in both economies. Despite these news and the overall strong global economic backdrop equity markets continued to sell off overnight with major Asian stock indices down 1-2% and futures in Europe and US down as well.
Overnight , Japan’s prime minister Abe supported continuation of easing by Bank of Japan by saying that he st ill expects dynamic quantitative easing and that the economy has not completely escaped deflation yet . Bank of Japan governor Kuroda was out saying that there is no change to approach in quantitative easing.
Following the US jobs report on Friday a number of Federal Reserve officials made comments about monetary policy. Kashkari stood out the most as he hinted that the high wage growth number if a sign that wage pressures were building could warrant more hikes this year and thus struck a more hawkish tone on monetary policy than usual. Kaplan and Williams made hawkish and dovish comments respectively.
The Iranian oil minister Zanganeh said this weekend that Iran can increase oil product ion swiftly if OPEC decides to end production cuts following the planned June review of the production cut deal. On Friday, the US oilrig count rose further to 765 indicating future rise in US production. The price on Brent crude has dropped below USD68/bbl level overnight partly owing to the posit ive supply fundamentals and partly to the above mentioned weak sen iment in equity markets.
