- The U.S. Federal Reserve voted to maintain monthly bond purchases at a minimum of $120 billion and produced no surprises yesterday, stating that the next few months would likely prove challenging for the economy before a strong growth rebound arrives in the second half of 2021. Markets reacted by finally eventually against the greenback and pushing stocks and risky assets broadly higher.
- New Zealand GDP and Australian employment data both came in stronger than expected.
- Today will bring major central bank policy releases from the Bank of England and the Swiss National Bank.
- Bitcoin has risen by approximately 10% over the last two days to make a strong bullish breakout well beyond $20,000 to hit a new record high. There is strong bullish momentum in Bitcoin.
- All major currencies except the Japanese yen and the Canadian dollar have hit new multi-year highs against the U.S. dollar, indicating that we are in a strongly trending and active Forex market. The EUR/USD currency pair in particular has broken above 1.2200 and looks likely to rise higher still over the coming days.
- Globally, new coronavirus cases are continuing to rise exponentially, with a new daily record all-time high of 716,598 confirmed cases made yesterday.
- Yesterday saw a record high number of 13,498 coronavirus deaths reported globally.
- Global coronavirus deaths have increased dramatically since early October to reach a level approximately 90% higher than the peak last April. Coronavirus new cases and deaths have fallen from recent peaks in the European Union, but both are currently increasing strongly in the U.S.A. A new “hard” lockdown has just been imposed in Germany and is about to be imposed in the Netherlands, while London also faces new imminent restrictions. The U.S.A. is currently confirming more than 250,000 new cases daily and is now seeing more than 3,500 deaths per day.
- Total confirmed new coronavirus cases worldwide stand at over 74.2 million with an average case fatality rate of 2.22%.
- The rate of new coronavirus infections appears to now be increasing most quickly in Albania, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Burkina Faso, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Cyprus, Denmark, Egypt, El Salvador, Estonia, Ireland, Israel, Jamaica, South Korea, Kosovo, Liechtenstein, Malaysia, Netherlands, Panama, Russia, South Africa, Spain, Sri Lanka, the U.K., the U.S.A., and Uruguay.