Australian Dollar Outlook - 12/01/2011
Bell FX Currency Outlook:
The AUD has had a huge rally overnight following coordinated intervention from the world's major central banks.
Australia: The local unit rallied close to 2.5% to record a 2 week high against the USD. Investor confidence received a big boost on news of the central banks' intervention, with equity and commodity markets all recording solid gains. It's still too early to tell if the overnight gains in the AUD will be maintained, as the combined intervention, while providing some immediate relief, only serves to highlight the seriousness of the challenges the global economy is facing.
Expect the AUD to remain relatively well supported throughout today's local session as the local equity market will follow the overnight offshore price action and head higher. Local markets will also be keeping an eye on the release of Chinese PMI data due out later today.
Majors: As mentioned above, it was rather an extraordinary night for global financial markets, with the US Federal Reserve, the ECB and the Central Banks of Canada, Switzerland, Japan and the UK all agreeing to a co-ordinated intervention to try and enhance global liquidity.
Essentially the Central Banks have agreed to reduce the interest rate on dollar liquidity swap lines. In a separate move the People's Bank of China cut their reserve requirement ratio by 50bps in an effort to encourage growth.
Equity markets in the US rose significantly with the three major indices in the US gaining more than 3%. European equities performed even better, with the Euro Stoxx up by more than 4.0%. In commodity markets, gold rose by 1.8 and copper, zinc and aluminium all recorded gains of over 5.0%.
Economic Calendar
1 DEC AU Retail Sales OCT
AU Building Approvals OCT
US ISM Manufacturing NOV