Wednesday 12th February 2020

President Trump tweeted as Jerome Powell launched into his testimony at Capitol Hill, saying that shares were falling the more he spoke. NAB’s Ray Attrill says this indicates where the President’s focus is ahead of this year’s election, so perhaps we can discount him becoming too aggressive against Europe on trade. The European economy continues to look lacklustre, which will be evidenced by industrial production numbers tonight. More government spending was the repeated call from the ECB’s Christine Lagarde today, whilst Boris Johnson is doing just that, committing to continue with the overspent, heavily delayed HS2 rail project, just as UK GDP numbers show a quarter without growth. Meanwhile, remember the Corona Virus. It seems to have been momentarily discounted by the markets, but for how long? The Aussie dollar was boosted by yesterday’s housing numbers and the RBNZ offers its monetary policy statement which, virus aside, could be fairly hawkish – we’ll see, around lunchtime.