The USD swung in small ranges against major forex rates today. USD/JPY kicked off with a pop towards 137.35 before subsiding back to unchanged. Its in the middle of its day's range as I update. We had a Bank of Japan speaker today who basically repeated Bank of Japan Governor Kuroda’s talking points. Key to these is the BOJ expects inflation to fall in the middle of the next fiscal year (which begins April 1 2023) without wage-price inflation kicking in. The BOJ is not expecting wages to drive inflation.

After USD/JPY hit its session high and began to drop back the USD lost ground against other majors. Ranges were lacklustre and the move has mainly retraced to leave little change pretty much across the board.

On the data front, we had Chinese trade data for November, disappointing. As I pointed out numerous times, though, with moves afoot in China to dial back restrictions economic data coming out now is more stale than usual. Economic activity should pick up in China in the months ahead. It may be a bumpy road, but trend improvement should be seen.

From Australia we had economic growth data for Q3, GDP missed a touch. There is more in the bullets above.

Earlier this week I posted to the effect that some key announcements were expected from China today on easing COVID restrictions. So far we have had reports out of a Chinese Communist Party Politburo meeting held on December 6. But the reports were all generic sort of stuff that did not provide much detail. As I post its still only midday or so in China (as an aside China only has only one official time zone, right across the breadth of the county, unofficially the far west uses China Standard Time minus 2 hours though) so there well be more to come.

Equities in the Asia-Pacific region traded mixed today so far. Japan’s Nikkei is down, HK is up (barely), Shanghai is down.

china time 07 December 2022

Pic via timeanddate.com