The readouts of the Biden – Xi meeting were reported during the session, with the overall view being that progress was made on a wide range of topics from Taiwan to the economy. There were a lot of ‘frank’ discussions. At a later news conference Biden may have undone some of the progress by saying, once again, that Chinese Communist Party Chairman Xi is a dictator. Biden didn’t score any diplomatic points for this remark (its reproduced in full in the ‘dictator’) post above.

The data point of focus was the Australian employment report, which showed a huge surge of +55K jobs added in October vs. +20K expected. A couple of points on this, the first is that the bulk of the jobs added were part-time, taking some of the shine off the big headline. The second is that many have dismissed the big gain due to the referendum held in Australia in mid-October, which required a large employment effort for people to staff voting booths and what have you. My problem with this dismissal is that analysts providing estimates were well aware of this event and would have accounted for it in their forecasts, and yet the headline +55K was nearly three times the consensus expectation. As for the currency response it was hard to discern. The USD strengthened almost right across the major FX board, EUR, GBP, NZD and CAD all dropped against the USD, as did AUD. The poor old JPY didn’t do much at all and in not losing ground scored itself a win.

In other data:

  • Japan’s exports rose at a slower pace in October than September
  • China's new home prices fell for the fourth month in October
usdyen wrap chart 16 November 2023