- A relatively quiet period in the markets was dominated yesterday by a strengthening US Dollar and a Japanese Yen remaining weak on an inflationary central bank. The New York session saw the USD/JPY currency pair rise strongly and briefly trade at a new 23-year high at €137 before falling back. It is not clear that this bullish trend will progress any further over the coming days, as the price continues to close below the key level of €137.60.
- Most stock markets and many commodities, especially energies, are losing value. Many commodities have seen sharp declines in value over the past few weeks, as risk sentiment has soured.
- The Chair of the Federal Reserve Jerome Powell said yesterday that there is “no guarantee” the Fed can bring down inflation without hurting the job market.
- Yesterday’s release of US CB Consumer Confidence data came in slightly lower than expected.
- There will be a release of US Core PCE Price Index data today, which may give clues on inflation.
- OPEC’s meeting continues today.
- Daily new coronavirus cases globally rose again last week, against the long-term trend. It may be that the omicron subvariant BA5 will cause another significant wave.
- It is estimated that 66.9% of the world’s population has received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccination, while approximately 6.9% of the global population is confirmed to have contracted the virus at some time, although the true number is highly likely to be much larger.
- Total confirmed new coronavirus cases worldwide stand at over 551.8 million with an average case fatality rate of 1.15%.
- The rate of new coronavirus infections appears to now be significantly increasing in Albania, Austria, Bangladesh, Iraq, Israel, Qatar, Bahrain, Cyprus, France, Germany, Greece, Guatemala, Haiti, Italy, Lithuania, Malta, Mexico, Morocco, Singapore, and the UAE.