Antipodeans Register Gains During A Limited Asia Session

It wasn't the most eventful session, with the opening remarks of a much awaited speech from Chinese Pres Xi proving rather unimpressive. Xi touched on several familiar talking points, tipping hat to China's "dual circulation" strategy, stressing Beijing's willingness to promote Hong Kong's & Macau's integration with mainland China and pledging to advance the reform and opening up of the Greater Bay area. USD/CNH stuck to a very tight range, with an in-line PBoC fix offering no material impetus, and the rate heads for the London session biased marginally lower.

• The Antipodeans were the best performers in G10 space, albeit NZD got some brief hiccups when RBNZ Asst Gov Hawkesby said that New Zealand's central bank wants to "go hard, go early" on policy. His comments revealed little new, basically echoing the message from RBNZ Chief Economist Ha from a few days back, and NZD didn't take much time to recover. AUD may have been supported by a continued surge in Westpac Consumer Confidence, attributed to the optimistic reception of the Federal Budget.
• Spot USD/KRW popped higher at the re-open, but more than erased early gains and slid into negative territory, printing its worst levels since Apr 2019. The BoK left its policy settings unchanged, as expected by virtually all analysts, while Gov Lee said that it's not the time to adopt QE and reiterated the central bank's readiness to intervene in FX markets if needed.
• Under the microscope today we have U.S. PPI, EZ industrial production, as well as comments from numerous speakers from the Fed, ECB, BoC, BoE & Riksbank.