Today’s session is passing quite calmly with no relevant releases on the agenda. However, the most important events are still ahead and the RBNZ meeting and a speech of the US President Donald Trump are undoubtedly among them. On the FX front one could spot that the NZD is quite resilient to broad-based power of the greenback as the NZDUSD is hovering around the flat line. On top of that, the USD is overtaking all of its peers in the G10 basket with the NOK being the worst currency which is a side-effect of dropping Brent oil prices.
Investors who expected Janet Yellen to douse expectations for the rate hike in December had to swallow a bitter pill after Yellen turned out to be even more constructive than at the post meeting conference last week. Well, there should be no doubt where all this leads to – unless there is a marked slowdown in the economy the Fed is on track to hike rates in December and add on to those moves next year while at the same time moving forward with balance sheet normalization.
After a successful opening the European equity markets continue thriving with the Spanish IBEX (SPA 35) being the top performer (+1.25%) following quite a hawkish speech delivered by J. Yellen and before an appearance of the US President Donald Trump on a long-awaited tax system overhaul. There is guesswork that Trump will sketch out a blueprint of a lowering of CIT from 35% to 20%, a reduction the number of tax brackets from seven to three and a cut of the top tax bracket from 39.6% to 35%. All of that proposals should be supportive of the US stock market. Notice, he is scheduled to speak at 8 pm BST.
Halliburton is one of the world’s largest oil field companies. The corporation struggled earlier during this decade as lower crude prices hit the shale business and had detrimental impact on demand for Halliburton company. However, improvement of the activity in the sector brightens outlook for Halliburton as well. Let us come forth with the fundamental analysis of the company.
We’ve already known a great deal of personal opinions voiced by the most prominent people when it comes to financial markets. There was another one expressed yesterday when Mike Novogratz called Bitcoin the biggest bubble ever but his recommendation was at odds with that view.
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand is widely expected to leave its OCR at 1.75% , however the meeting will be the first with Grant Spencer being an acting director, hence at least subtle changes in rhetoric could occur. The probability of a hike today is close to zero, thus focus will be on the statement and some references to the ex-change rate and inflation as well.