Morning Update – 01/12/2016 – by Arjun Lakhanpal

Morning all.. Wall St had a rather soft close considering the rally in oil and finished marginally lower in the S&P. Oil continued to rise after the OPEC deal and Asia saw another 1% gain. This helped Asia markets to rise with the Nikkei closing up just over 1%. This also spurred higher by the weaker JPY which made a high of 114.83 but fell into the close and broke back down through 114.00. BoJ’s Sakurai: yield curve control has worked well so far; will continue to buy huge amounts of JGBs to control rates; no magic wand to emerge from low inflation; Govt/private sector must play role to boost growth; bond yields moving roughly in line with BoJ expectations, not seeing large swings in yields nor BoJ’s JGB buying amounts; better for FX to move stably without large volume; true that weak JPY pushes up inflation but unsure how much further JPY will weaken going forward, watching Trump economic policies closely.. Slightly better China data helping stocks as well and helped take AUD off the lows. China Nov Mfg PMI beat: 51.7 vs 51.0 cons; Non-Mfg PMI: 54.7 vs 54.0 prev.. This morning we get PMI data from Sweden, Norway, Spain France Germany and the UK. We also have Italian GDP data. Good luck.