Forex and Bitcoin news for Asia trading Tuesday 18 September 2018

US President Trump announced additional tariffs on $200B of Chinese goods. He added also that if china retaliated he'd impose tariffs on a further 267bn of imports.

'Risk' came under pressure with AUD one the bigger losers (not a huge drop).

As the session progressed and China opened we did not see much sign of any immediate retaliation from China. We even got reports of quite restrained comments from China's commerce minister. The response helped risk to climb back, AUD fully reversed its gains and popped its overnight high briefly. Now, on these commerce minister comments, after they were reported it as noted they were from Monday, prior to the Trump tariff announcement. It may have been helpful to have that made clear up front, but no. Welcome to FX. Mustn't grumble.

Prior to all this happening, while we were waiting on something on tariffs we had some fun and games from New Zealand. NZ PM Ardern said she'd seen a preview of the coming GDP figures and was 'pleased' with them. NZD/USD was taken higher on the comment.

And then a spokesman for the Prime Minister said she was mistaken, she had not seen the GDP result. Ditto on the Welcome to FX, mustn't grumble. NZD gave back its pop as the China tariff news hit and then recovered. Its had a roller coaster ride, admittedly in not too big a range.

CAD was a bit of a mover also, USD/CAD higher on the China news, then it retraced too. We did have some news that Freeland was to head back to Washington this week for more Nafta negotiation. Of course she is. This is not going to finish any time soon, Deadline is apparently October 1.

EUR,GBP moved to a smaller degree, each down on China tariffs, each back up again .

USD/JPY fell early but as the Tokyo morning progressed it recovered back towards 112. There was little idiosyncratic yen news, a few comments from government ministers. The BOJ make their policy statement tomorrow so we can expect a few more jitters ahead of that.

Still to come: