Central banks, OPEC +, earnings season, dollar and ECB

Jul 16, 2020

Yesterday started with the Bank of Japan. As we have already noted, the parameters of monetary policy (rates and quantitative easing program) were left unchanged. But at the same time, the Central Bank lowered its own forecast for the country's economic growth in the current fiscal year (ends in March 2021): GDP will decrease by 4.5% -5.7% (previously the range was 3% -5%), that is, outlook is worsened very significant.

The Bank of Canada also did not change the status quo: the parameters of monetary policy were left unchanged.

Among other news, it is worth noting the results of the OPEC + meeting. As we predicted, the voluntary 9.7 million b / d cut for August was not extended. This means that in a couple of weeks, the supply in the oil market may immediately grow by 2 million b / d, which is a very strong bearish signal. On the other hand, OPEC + assures that the overall reduction in August and September will be not 7.7 million bpd, but about 8.54 million bpd over the next two months, since Iraq, Nigeria, Angola, Russia and Kazakhstan will compensate for previous non-compliance.

Otherwise, markets continued to be in risky mode following the announcement of Moderna vaccine trials. We have note once again that this news does not solve the current problems in any way, even if we forget that this is a very early stage of testing and more than one month will pass before the vaccine appears on the shelves.

However, this temporary optimism boosted equity markets and also weighed on the dollar. As a result, the Dollar Index tried to break the key support 96. So far, we cannot state unambiguously that the level has been taken, which means that all our recommendations for buying the dollar remain relevant. But if a breakdown does occur, then it makes sense to turn into dollar sales across the entire spectrum of the foreign exchange market.

The earnings season, meanwhile, continues and yesterday's reports can be treated as good ones for the current conditions. However, the growth of equity markets was very limited. This is largely due to the fact that those companies whose results turned out to be better than forecasted had their own unique reasons for improving performance, which, moreover, were of a rather one-step nature.

In general, stock markets are clearly losing momentum. For example, today the data on Chinese GDP came out better than forecasted, but the Chinese stock market is in deep red.

Today we are preparing for new reports from US corporations (Netflix, Johnson and Johnson, Morgan Stanly, Bank of America and others), as well as the ECB's decision on the parameters of monetary policy in the Eurozone.