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GBP

Risk appetite fades after Powell shuts door on doves

Foreign exchange markets are trading with a mild risk-off tone after yesterday’s disappointing Treasury auction and hawkish commentary from Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell helped lift yields and bolster demand for the dollar. Equity futures are setting up for a modestly softer open, commodity prices are still trending downward, and rate-sensitive currencies—like the Canadian dollar—are back on the defensive. Yields reversed higher yesterday morning after a $24-billion auction of 30-year Treasuries failed to meet sufficient demand, with a “tail”—the extra premium demanded by investors to hold long-term paper—exceeding 5 basis points. The pension funds and insurers which typically absorb the...

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Oil slick

• Mixed markets. Equities ticked up with the S&P500 enjoying its 8th straight gain. USD index consolidated, but commodity currencies like the AUD slipped back.• Bonds & oil. The slide in long-end bond yields & oil continued. US 10yr yields are now ~50bps below the late-October peak. Oil is at a multi-month low.• AUD stumble. AUD has given back ~1/2 its recent rebound. Domestic wage & jobs data released next week could see AU rate expectations rebound. With not too much economic news most markets have consolidated over the past day. Equities have generally ticked up with the major European...

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All talk, no action in markets

The dollar is staging a modest rebound after a cast of hawkish Fed speakers worked to put the rate cut genie back in the bottle yesterday. In a series of appearances, Bowman, Goolsbee and Logan all noted that inflation remained too high and the labour market was still healthy by pre-pandemic standards, and Neel Kashkari told Bloomberg there’d been “no discussion” of lowering interest rates among policymakers. Bets on at least four quarter-point cuts by early 2025 slipped slightly through the session, and Treasury yields retraced some of their gains. More Fedspeak is in the offing today: Traders are expecting...

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Fedspeak back in driver’s seat

 Aaaaannd we’re back. Ten-year Treasuries are again yielding more than 4.63 percent and the dollar is up after the Minneapolis Federal Reserve’s Neel Kashkari warned rates might have further to climb in the months ahead. “Before we declare that we’re absolutely done, we’ve solved the problem, let’s get more data and see how the economy evolves,” he told Fox News yesterday, “We need to let the data keep coming to us to see if we really have got the inflation genie back in the bottle”. As if to punctuate Kashkari’s point, the Reserve Bank of Australia last night set a...

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AUD revival continues

• US jobs. A softer US jobs report added to the downward pressure on US yields & the USD. Equities continue to bounce back. AUD at its highest since late-August.• RBA hike? Attention will be on tomorrow’s RBA decision. Most analysts are expecting a rate rise, but markets are less sure (~60% chance is priced in).• AUD vol. Market pricing points to AUD volatility post the RBA, with a ‘surprise’ no change likely to generate a larger knee-jerk AUD reaction, in our view. Markets were fixated on the latest US jobs report on Friday night. The weaker than predicted figures...

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