Wall Street gains bring further pressure on weakening Aussie bonds
Wall Street saw record gains overnight, its highest climb in the past five months, spurring a new round of weaker opening for Australian bonds on Wednesday as analysts said that safe-haven assets like bonds almost naturally go on a spiral down direction when equities gallop on their way up.
By 0830 AEST today on the Sydney Futures Exchange, the December 10-year bond futures contract declined from 94.995 (with an implied yield of 5.005 percent) to 94.980 while the December three-year bond futures contract shrunk from 95.230 (4.770 percent) to 95.180 (4.820 percent).
It was a case of the local bond being edged out by the US shares market as 4Cast financial market head of research Ray Attrill observed that "equities went to the moon and bonds didn't go down, in terms of US treasuries."
In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average wrapped up its trading day 1.8 percent better to 10,944.72 points with the Bank of America and Boeing leading the pack of top gainers while the Standards & Poor's 500 index surged by 2.1 percent to 1,160.75 points, marking the first time that the index had breached through the 1,150 level since May of the current year.
Further fuelling the rallies seen in US stocks was the service-sector index furnished by the Institute for Supply Management, showing improvements in September numbers of 53.2 points as against the 51.5 points registered in the previous month, as analysts pointed out that figures beyond the 50-mark underscores considerable growth in the sector.
Also, following the Reserve Bank of Australia's (RBA) decision to opt for another pause in policy rates this October, Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago chief Charles Evans hinted that the US itself requires further intervention from the federal government, even signalling that the economy may require some fair amount of manageable inflation increase.
Mr Attrill said that encouraging economic data and such declarations from the US financial sector were generally shoring up the local economy as he stressed that "we have a beautiful combination of the data not being disastrous and those comments from the Fed."