Wall Street capped off a volatile trading week on Friday night with strong gains across the board as risk markets absorbed the triple whammy of Fed, ECB and BOJ central bank meetings. While the ECB was somewhat dovish and the BOJ made no material change to its yield control policies, markets still need to grapple with a stronger than expected US GDP print as expectations of more interest rate rises from the Fed kept the USD highly elevated against the majors. The Australian dollar slumped to 66 cents as a result.
US bond markets saw a big lift across the yield curve with the 10 year surpassing the 4% level while oil prices held on to their recent gains with Brent crude now above the $84USD per barrel level. Gold suffered alongside other undollars but managed to clawback some of the losses on Friday night, settling at the $1960USD per ounce level.
Looking at share markets in Asia from Friday’s session with mainland Chinese share markets lifted very strongly on stimulus innuendo with the Shanghai Composite up more than 1.8% higher at 3275 points while in Hong Kong the Hang Seng Index has closed more than 1.4% higher to 19916 points.
The full text of this article is available to MacroBusiness subscribers