The first piece of today’s core data was released overnight and showed that Japan’s unemployment unexpectedly shrank overnight. Jobs figures surpassed their target and showed that unemployment was at its lowest for over 20 years reaching just 3.0%. Unfortunately, this was accompanied by a fall in Household spending which declined once again. The figure was projected to reach -1.3% however slightly surpassed expectations reaching 0.5%. No doubt due to the weak inflation in japan, this may entice the Bank of Japan to look at more proactive Quantitative easing measure in the near future.
Following the announcements JPY lost grounds against the majors dropping from 0.00749 to 0.00741 JPY/GBP. The Yen fared little better against the USD and Euro closing at JPY/USD 0.0097 and 0.00871 against the Euro.
Following the data from Japan saw the release of the Monthly Building approvals for Australia which saw a considerable surge from last month’s figure of -4.7% to an encouraging 11.3%. The significant increase was due to development of apartments which rose by 23%. House construction permits actually fell by 0.5%. It however did little to assist the AUD.
Later focused turned to Europe and the German CPI figure which missed its target of 0.1% registering 0.0%. The Euro saw loses against the pound and closed the UK session at EUR/GBP 0.8519 experiencing a day low of 0.8503.
Finally, we had the US Conference Board consumer confidence. The reading didn’t disappoint and the Figure easily surpassed the target of 97.2 reaching 101.1.
As a key indicator consumer confidence and therefore spending rose to its highest level in a year. The figure demonstrated that consumers had renewed optimism, jobs opportunities were more available. Consumer also expecting business condition to improve over the next 6 months.
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