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Australian dollar smashed by US jobs boom

Published 07/02/2022, 12:28 pm
Updated 09/07/2023, 08:32 pm
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DXY was only firm Friday night amid tearaway US jobs numbers as markets get excited about the possibility of largely irrelevant ECB tightening:

 

But that couldn’t save the AUD which was poleaxed across DMs:

Oil is the one-way rocketship of doom. Gold is dead:

Base metals did better:

But miners (LON:GLEN) are flamed out:

EM stocks (NYSE:EEM) held their latest cascading ledge:

But the canary in the coal mine, global junk debt (NYSE:HYG), is stone dead silent:

As yields blasted higher. She can’t take it, Captain! The 5-10 is going to invert!

S&P 500 Futures managed a bounce after the Meta crash the day before but there is no basis for anything but lower on the above macro spread of indicators:

Driving the action was tearaway US jobs. Goldman with the wrap:

BOTTOM LINE: Nonfarm payrolls rose 467k in January—well above consensus and even further above our forecast of -250k. The ex-Omicron pace was probably even higher, as the household survey showed a 763k increase in unpaid absences, some of whom were likely excluded from the nonfarm payroll counts. We expected the very low pace of year-end layoffs to support job growth this month, and with hindsight, this tailwind more than offset the temporary Omicron drag. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.0% due to higher labor force participation. Average hourly earnings jumped to 5.7% year-on-year from 4.7% as previously reported, 0.5pp above consensus. We continue to expect the Fed to raise the funds rate five times this year, with the first hike in March.

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This was so far above consensus, and the revisions so strong at +7ook, that it smells of numberwang which may be why DXY was held back.

That said, it did not prevent big moves in credit markets with a bear flattening, especially in the belly of the curve, driving widening spreads in global junk that is the number one warning of further equity market and AUD weakness ahead:

Junk debt and the Pacific peso travel together and are only going one way as the Fed tightens into a slowdown and the known unknown of a credit event.

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