Bad news is once again good news... for stocks that is.
After a month and a half of markets unable to decide if they should buy or sell on ugly data, over the weekend, People’s Bank of China Governor Zhou Xiaochuan expressed faith in the economy, and said there is no basis for further Yuan devaluation, something the PBOC has said consistently over the past year, despite two sharp devaluation episodes.
Excerpted from James Stack's InvesTech.com,
Technical Evidence: Confirming a bear market
There was some hope in early Japanese trading that after a seemingly endless rout in the USDJPY, which has seen the Yen surge the most in the past two weeks since the 1998 Asian crisis, the BOJ would intervene, if not via policy where it has botched things up beyond repair then directly by selling Yen on the tape: the reason for this is not only yesterday's direct intervention that sent the USDJPY soaring by over 150 pips briefly, but also after a report that Finance Ministry’s FX chief Masatsugu Asakawa met deputy chief cabinet secretary to discuss market issues; this was followed by a mee
Yesterday morning, when musing on the day's key event namely Yellen's congressional testimony, we dismissed the most recent bout of European bank euphoria which we said "will be brief if not validated by concrete actions, because while central banks have the luxury of jawboning, commercial banks are actually burning through funds - rapidly at that - and don't have the luxury of hoping for the best while doing nothing." This morning DB has wiped out all of yesterday's gain.
With US markets failing to hold on to today's "Deutsche Bank" euphoric gains today despite, or rather due to Janet Yellen's Congressional testimony, traders in mainland China remains locked out due to the Lunar New Year holiday, while Japan is mercifully taking a break - mercifully, because otherwise the Nikkei would be crashing. However, one market is back online as Hong Kong traders return to their desks to see carnage around the globe, and most importantly, are unable to hedge arbed exposure between China, Japan and the US.