News and data flow was very light indeed during the session here. As I am writing the news is crossing that US Senate Republican and Democrat negotiators are nearing a deal on a short-term spending measure intended to keep the government open after October 1st. The measure is a stop-gap for 4 to 6 weeks of funding. Apart from that there isn’t anything fresh at all on the news front.

From Japan we had some lacklustre verbal intervention comments aimed at supporting the JPY. USD/JPY is barely off its session high (in a tiny range) so these haven’t weighed too much on the pair.

From the People’s Bank of China we had a record high divergence between the modelled estimate for the USD/CNY reference rate setting and the actual. See bullets above for more on this.

Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis President Neel Kashkari said he is in the ‘one more Fed Funds rate hike this year’ camp.

Asian equity markets:

  • Japan’s Nikkei 225 -0.9%

  • China’s Shanghai Composite -0.1%

  • Hong Kong’s Hang Seng -0.6%

  • South Korea’s KOSPI -1.2%

  • Australia’s S&P/ASX 200 -0.6%

USD/JPY is a picture of pent-up energy ready to burst ...

usdyen wrap chart 26 September 2023