Australia: Following some better than expected employment results released in Australia yesterday, a positive jobs and spending report out of the US combined with an interest rate hike in Europe helped push the AUD back towards USD1.0800 on Thursday night.

The European Central Bank raised its benchmark interest rate to 1.5%, its second increase this year.

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While the move was widely expected by the market, it did help investor’s optimism, pushing the EUR higher following the announcement.

The AUD is expected to remain quite firm on the day as our market digests the news from overnight.

A move towards USD1.0800 is likely, breaking the one-month high of USD1.0795.

There is no major data being released today, instead RBA assistant governor Guy Debelle will deliver a speech in Adelaide to the Workshop on Global Macro and Finance Issues.

Majors: Stronger than expected data and interest rate rises spurred the market on overnight after a week of concerns over the health of the global economy.

US payroll company, Automatic Data Processing (ADP) released a report stating that private US employers added 157k workers last month, much better than the 95k expected by economists.

The healthy jobs number indicated that tonight’s US non-farm payrolls figure may not be as bad as some had initially feared. Optimism grew in the market and as a result we also saw US equities and commodities higher.

Economists have now raised their forecasts for Friday’s US jobs data, with the median forecast now for a gain of 125k non-farm payroll jobs, compared with original expectations of a rise of 108k.

Elsewhere, while the Europeans were increasing interest rates, the Bank of England kept their policy rate unchanged at 0.5%.

While this was also expected by the market, it will now wait for the minutes from the meeting (due in 2 weeks) to see whether or not any discussions on QE took place.

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