Friday of last weekend was the day 2062 years ago in 44BC that Julius Caesar was murdered by a conspiracy of senators. Theresa May must have heaved a sigh of relief that she survived Friday and no doubt was thinking that a modern day JC opposite her deserved the same fate!
Last week in the Currency Markets was a lot about GBP which after last week is at the top of the leader board of the world’s performing currencies although it is also a leading contender for the currency with the largest moves due to the agonizing progress(?) of Brexit.
The Japanese Yen was at the other end of the performers partly as a function of recovery in general market risk sentiment.Bank of Japan kept policy unchanged as expected but downgraded its economic assessment as a result of the slowdown in the global economy. After all this time, the policy makers at BOJ must be racking their brains to find new ways to describe how the measures taken have produced so very little for the Japanese economy!
Prime Minister May will be wishing she had this many declared Parliamentary supporters. Meanwhile GBP has been marched up and down the hill this past week as markets have reacted to the twists and turns of the on off Brexit process:
Oh the Grand old Duke of York,
He had ten thousand men;
He marched them up to the top of the hill,
And he marched them down again.
And when they were up, they were up,
And when they were down, they were down,
And when they were only half-way up,
They were neither up nor down
Discussion and Analysis by Humphrey Percy, Chairman and Founder
Never a dull non-farm Non-farm payrolls data almost always provides the observers an opportunity to witness and potentially trade with some volatility in the markets. More often than not the salience of the event and the mixed expectations moving into it leads to more price fallout from the noise generated from the event instead of […]
Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell gave a speech in Washington last night that further confirmed his hard line thinking: US interest rates will need to go up more and probably it will take two separate rate rises to see if that is sufficient-the clear implication is that if it needs more, then that is what […]
US Economy The US job figures on Friday most certainly set the cat among the pigeons: with non farm payrolls expected to be up by 187,000 and the market’s expectation that Chairman Powell of the Federal Reserve was talking the talk rather than walking the walk when he had said last Wednesday that rates were […]