Right now the U.S. dollar is the Energizer Bunny of currencies. The greenback climbed to 115.28 yen this morning. That’s the highest level since February 9. It also moved up against the euro, rising 0.7% to $1.0541.
The U.S. dollar continues to move up. The Dollar Spot Index (DXY) has climbed 3.2% since November 4 to 100.16 as of noon today, November 15. That puts the index, which tracks the U.S. dollar against a basket of currencies from significant trading partners, knocking on the door of resistance at 100. (The 52-week high for the index is 100.51.)
For me the question today was whether the market would look like the “vulnerable” market of the first four days of last week–you know when U.S. stocks moved lower, the dollar continued to climb but so did the yen, and emerging market equities fell and it looked like we were moving back to a typical risk-off market–or whether Friday’s strong day for U.S. stocks broke the pattern.
Any post-Brexit crisis will will be a slow motion crisis driven by a gradual slowdown in economic growth in the United Kingdom, the European Union, Japan, China and the United States that results in a dimming of prospects for corporate earnings growth. The crisis will be interrupted periodically, as it has been in the last two days, by the hope that this time central banks will be able to intervene and get this or that economy growing again
It’s central banks to the front today–but you really need an inside-bank scorecard to understand why markets have reacted as they have to the news/rumors out of the Bank of Japan and the People’s Bank of China this morning.
In anticipation of a weaker yen and central bank intervention, bad news on the Japanese economy produced a huge rally in Tokyo with the Nikkei 225 index soaring 7.16% on Monday.
I think that in for the next six to nine months volatility will increase for China’s currency and that the possibility of another yuan devaluation needs to be taken seriously as a market risk
