UK labor market gives the BoE's room for maneuver

22 ene 2020

The main event of yesterday in terms of macroeconomic statistics was the publication of statistics on the UK labor market. The data pleasantly surprised. Recall that we expected rather weak statistics - the British economy has been painfully unconvincing in recent times.

Nevertheless, the UK economy for three months until November created 208K new jobs, which is almost 2 times higher than analysts' expectations. The average weekly wage also came out better than expected (+ 3.2%).

Against the background of such data, supporters of the fact that the Bank of England will lower the rate at the next meeting sharply fell silent. Indeed, data on the labor market show that the Central Bank has no reason to rush. This sharply increased the chances that the bet will be left unchanged. The pound, of course, reacted positively to statistics and a shift in market expectations.

Recall in this regard to our recommendation to buy a pound on the slopes.

In general, for Europe yesterday was a good day. Indices from the ZEW Institute came out very good (relative to past data) both in the Eurozone as a whole (the expectations index came out almost 2 times higher than in December) and in Germany (the expectations index was +26.7 with a +15 forecast). So the growth of the euro looked quite natural. But for its continuation, this impulse will be clearly not enough.

In this regard, Thursday looks more promising: on this day, the ECB will announce its decision on the monetary policy parameters in the Eurozone. But we'll talk about this in tomorrow's review.

And today, the main event will be the announcement of the Bank of Canada’s decision on monetary policy parameters. Experts do not expect any changes. We are also inclined to believe that the bid will be left unchanged. But given the general trends in the development of the global economy in general and in Canada, in particular, there are risks of a rate reduction. Moreover, the reduction potential is far from exhausted, unlike the ECB or the Bank of Japan. Considering that the USDCAD pair has been treading water for two weeks now, fluctuating in the range of 50 points, there is a possibility of a strong movement in pairs with the Canadian dollar today. Moreover, the direction of movement is not obvious. Our recommendation in this regard is to work along the way. That is, if the pair goes above 1.3090 - we buy, if below 1.3020 - we sell.