Market News

The dollar's slide reflects a shift from viewing the Treasury's buyback expansion as a stabilising measure to treating it as confirmation of how stretched US fiscal dynamics have become. Bessent's signal that repurchases could increase further, rather than reassuring markets, appears to have reinforced the view that officials are managing a structural problem with tactical tools, a distinction Goldman Sachs has framed explicitly in warning that yield suppression becomes progressively less effective once markets fixate on sovereign financing dynamics rather than technical positioning. The scale of the rotation into gold and bitcoin, with the latter on track for its steepest weekly gain in two and a half years, signals that at least part of…

The data lands squarely within the range the Bank of Japan needs to justify moving in September, with core inflation matching forecasts and the closely watched core-core measure accelerating to 1.9%. The pickup in service sector inflation is arguably the more important signal for policymakers than the headline energy driven move, since it points to firms passing on labour costs in a tight jobs market rather than a one-off pass-through from oil. Wholesale inflation running at 7.2%, with electricity the largest contributor, suggests further upward pressure is still working its way through the pipeline toward consumers, reinforcing the case that price growth has further to run even as government subsidies continue to cap the headline rate.…

The People’s Bank of China is due to set the daily USD/CNY reference rate at around 0115 GMT (2115 US Eastern time), a fixing that remains one of the most closely watched signals in Asian foreign exchange markets. China operates a managed floating exchange rate system, under which the renminbi (yuan) is allowed to trade within a prescribed band around a central reference rate, or midpoint, set each trading day by the PBOC. The current trading band permits the currency to move plus or minus 2% from the official midpoint during onshore trading hours. Each morning, the PBOC determines the midpoint based on a range of inputs. These include the previous day’s closing price, movements in major currencies, particularly the US dollar, broader…

The scale of the drawdown, 1.6 million ounces since January, values reserve losses at 33.7 billion dollars over seven months, underscores how far Russia's fiscal position has deteriorated as weaker energy revenue forces the government to lean on its sovereign wealth buffers. The mirror mechanism through which the central bank offsets these transactions means the gold sales are effectively a proxy for the scale of the Finance Ministry's own drawdown from the National Wellbeing Fund, making the pace of decline a useful real time gauge of Russian budget stress. For global gold markets, the shift removes a buyer that was once the single largest sovereign source of demand, though the volumes involved are modest relative to overall central bank…

The acceleration in output growth, combined with near record selling price inflation and a sustained rise in employment, strengthens the case for the Bank of Japan to proceed with a rate hike at its September meeting. A private sector expanding at its fastest pace in six months, alongside firms still able to push through some of the steepest price increases on record, suggests the economy can absorb tighter policy without an immediate loss of momentum, addressing one of the central bank's key hesitations around timing. The divergence between manufacturing, where export orders hit their strongest pace since 2018 on semiconductor and AI related demand, and easing new export business in services, points to an uneven recovery that…

Bitcoin forecasts for 2028: One speculative fractal scenario maps a $148,000 peak

Bitcoin could approach $145,000-$150,000 around summer 2027 under one long-range chart scenario. The projection combines a repeated historical price pattern with an extended resistance line drawn across three major Bitcoin tops. However, this is a low-confidence scenario, not a trade plan or a claim that Bitcoin must follow the projected path.

Key takeaways from this Bitcoin forecast

• Projected peak: Approximately $148,000, potentially during summer 2027.
• Bitcoin price when the chart was created: Around $73,400 on August 21, 2026.
• Distance to the projected peak: Bitcoin was trading at roughly half the forecasted high, meaning the scenario implies approximately…

The plan as described would target the two main routes shippers have used to avoid the Strait of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia's Yanbu pipeline and the UAE's Fujairah terminal, which together handle roughly 5.5 million barrels a day. Combined with a push to fully shut the roughly 5 million barrels a day still moving through the strait via the US backed shadow fleet, a successful campaign would remove a significant share of the alternative capacity that has kept some Gulf oil flowing despite the broader blockade. Given Brent is already trading near 93 dollars a barrel on existing tensions, any credible move against Yanbu or Fujairah would likely be read by traders as a materially larger supply shock than the disruptions seen so far, given the scale…

This leans mildly inflationary at the margin, though it's a narrower, more targeted pressure than the oil and Treasury stories.

The canal handles a meaningful share of global container and LNG traffic between the US East Coast and Asia, so tighter daily slots typically show up as higher transit premiums, longer queues and route diversions (via Suez or around the Cape), all of which raise shipping costs. That's a similar transmission mechanism to the 2023-2024 drought, which pushed up freight rates and spot charges without triggering a broad based inflation shock. The scale here (35 to 32 transits) is a smaller cut than during the worst of the 2023 drought, and the delayed draft restrictions actually ease pressure in the near term, so the…

Trump's comments add another data point to the market's ongoing assessment of how much longer the Iran conflict, and the associated oil price premium, is likely to run. His characterization of Iran's economy as being in severe distress, with triple digit inflation and a collapsing currency, feeds a narrative that Tehran's capacity to sustain the standoff is eroding, which could support expectations of eventual de-escalation and a corresponding pullback in the geopolitical risk premium currently embedded in Brent and WTI. At the same time, his reaffirmation that Iran will not be allowed to obtain a nuclear weapon signals no near term softening in the underlying US position, meaning traders are unlikely to price out the conflict risk…

Japan July 2026 CPI

2.0% y/y, will be enough to keep BoJ September rate hike expectations on the boil

• vs. expected 1.9%, prior 1.6%
• 0.4% m/m (prior 0.3%

Core CPI 1.8% y/y

• expected 1.8%, prior 1.6%

CPI Ex-Food and Energy 1.8% y/y

• expected 1.9%, prior 1.7%

I'll have more to come on this separately, detail and implications etc. 

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Background to this:

• Preview: Japan core CPI seen hitting six month high, lifting bets on BoJ September hike

This article was written by Eamonn Sheridan at investinglive.com.

New Zealand trade data, July 2026

• Trade balance NZ$-1.95 billion (prior 23mn)
• Imports NZ$+9.34 billion (prior 8.07bn)
• Exports NZ$+7.39 billion (prior 8.09bn)
• New Zealand July annual trade balance NZ$-5.24 billion (prior -3.75bn)

This article was written by Eamonn Sheridan at investinglive.com.

The upside surprise, a rise to -14 against a Reuters poll consensus for a decline to -18, adds to a run of stronger than expected UK data and could feed into expectations for firmer household spending in the months ahead. The jump in the major purchases sub-index to its highest since December 2021 is the most consequential detail for retailers and durable goods sectors, since that measure tends to lead actual big ticket spending more directly than the headline gauge. The improvement is corroborated by a cluster of other confidence surveys, including YouGov/Cebr, BRC-Opinium, Barclays and LSEG/Ipsos, reducing the chance this is noise in a single dataset. Still, GfK's own note that inflation is back on the rise, alongside ongoing Middle…