A man walks past an electronic display showing Asian markets indices outside a brokerage in Tokyo on January 8 2020. Picture: REUTERS/Issei Kato
The dollar nursed small losses in currency trading, though moves were muted ahead of a key Thursday speech from Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell in which he is expected to outline the central bank’s next steps. “If you look at the macro numbers, a lot of the improvement in the second quarter seems to be slowing down in momentum,” said Tai Hui, Hong Kong-based JPMorgan Asset Management chief market strategist in Asia.
Producers evacuated 310 offshore facilities and shut 1.56-million barrels a day of crude output, 84% of Gulf of Mexico’s offshore production — near the 90% outage that Hurricane Katrina brought 15 years ago. Stronger-than-expected business sentiment in a German survey on Tuesday had again underpinned the euro by buttressing markets’ belief that the continent can bounce back from the coronavirus faster than the US.