Market Brief, North America

Investors are making up for a lack of actual intelligence on the state of the economy by betting on artificial intelligence instead. The dollar is attracting inflows, mid-curve Treasury yields are pushing higher, and equity futures are pointing to further gains at the open after OpenAI and Advanced Micro Devices yesterday announced they would collaborate to build AI data centres, with the ChatGPT maker agreeing to buy tens of billions of dollars’ worth of chips from AMD while taking a 10-percent stake in the chipmaker over time. The euro is consolidating around lower levels as the dust settles after French...

Rumours of the dollar’s shutdown-inflicted death have been greatly exaggerated. The greenback is holding firm against its major rivals this morning despite confirmation that the US government will remain crippled into a second week, indicating that traders don’t expect the political impasse to result in any meaningful diminishment in the global appetite for American financial assets. On a week-to-date basis, the pound and euro are up 0.3 percent against the dollar, the Canadian dollar and Mexican peso are down 0.2 percent, and the Australian dollar is sitting on a nice circa-1-percent gain after the Reserve Bank signalled a more cautious...