- Markets saw a small risk rally yesterday initially continue from Friday, with major currencies all gaining firmly against the USD, and stocks, BTC/USD and ETH/USD rose to their highest levels seen since mid-June. However, the action reversed later in the day, triggered by growth fears from major US corporate earnings data. The USD still looks prone to weakness unless it makes a strong recovery as today’s major Forex sessions get underway.
- The Reserve Bank of Australia released the minutes of its most recent monetary policy meeting. The minutes contained no surprises, with the headline takeaway being the prioritization of fighting inflation, but the Australian Dollar has been rising strongly since the release.
- Analysts are scaling back their formerly higher expectations of a forthcoming US rate hike as high as 1% which had been set after annualized US inflation reached a new 40-year high annualized rate of 9.1% last week. A second successive rate hike of 0.75% is now the consensus expectation following remarks from Fed member Bostic and lower than predicted inflation expectations data.
- WTI Crude Oil is making a bullish move after bouncing from the key support at $95 a few days ago and is now trading above $100 per barrel.
- Daily new coronavirus cases globally fell last week for the first week since early June, reversing the short-term trend of an increasing number of confirmed cases.
- It is estimated that 66.8% of the world’s population has received at least one dose of a coronavirus vaccination, while approximately 7.2% 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 568.7 million with an average case fatality rate of 1.12%.
- The rate of new coronavirus infections appears to now be most significantly increasing in Belgium, Bulgaria, Croatia, Peru, Romania, Serbia, Venezuela, Barbados, Brunei, Bolivia, Cyprus, Germany, Guatemala, Italy, Japan, Kosovo, Lebanon, Mexico, Montenegro, Paraguay, Qatar, and Tunisia.