Japan

For many years in the last two decades the Japanese equity market has been taken as a textbook case of secular bear market. Since the historical high of 1989 the Nikkei 225 stock index of Japan has been subdued by a prolonged downtrend that hit its lowest low in 2009 after losing about 80% from the high. Intermediate rallies had developed meanwhile, some of them were consistent, like the four years recovery started in 2003, but the although considerable +130% that followed did not reverse the secular trend that prevailed again thereafter whit a new deep fall.

A court on Tuesday ordered the state and the operator of the crippled Fukushima No. 1 atomic plant to pay a total of about $4.4 million in damages for the 2011 nuclear disaster, the second ruling of its kind in a series of group lawsuits filed nationwide.

The Fukushima District Court ordered the government and Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc. to pay 500 million yen ($4.4 million) to about 2,900 of the 3,800 plaintiffs, many of whom did not evacuate and stayed at their homes in Fukushima and elsewhere in the midst of one of the world’s worst nuclear crises.

In first half of the day the pair continued to move, as expected. However, a speech delivered by Governor Powell created a favourable impulse for the buck and elevated it against the Yen by 0.36% just in couple of hours.

The fact that the pair did fall below the 112.40 level and made a rebound additionally confirms that it is moving in a medium-term ascending triangle.

In result of combination of technical factors and fundamental events, the currency pair made a turn around and broke though the bottom boundary of a previously dominant ascending channel.

From technical point of view, the rate encountered a resistance level formed by the monthly R2 at 112.54 and the upper boundary of a long-term falling wedge.

Tokyo-based Nomura said it expects the North Korea tensions to stay controlled, even after the rogue state on Tuesday fired a missile over Japan.

"We see today’s provocation as in line with our base case for the [Korean] peninsula – that tension will remain elevated for some time, but also remain contained," a team of Nomura research analysts said in a Tuesday note led by Hong Kong-based economist Minoru Nogimori.

Japanese labour market conditions remain incredibly strong, according to data released by the Japanese government today.
Japan’s job openings-to-applicants ratio came to 1.52 in July on seasonally adjusted terms, rising 0.01 of a point from June and improving for the fifth straight month, the Ministry of Health, Labor and Welfare said on Tuesday.

The ratio measures the number of jobs available compared to the number of active job seekers. That means that for every 100 people seeking work in July, there were 152 jobs available, the most since February 1974. July’s ratio exceeded that seen in the early 1990s, during Japan’s economic bubble era.

Yen, the japanese currency, is the safe haven, or better, is the safest of them all, according to a correlation analysis by Goldman Sachs Group Inc. economists. Goldman economists, led by Kevin Daly, compared daily and monthly fluctuations for a basket of 28 market currencies across two five-year periods from 2007 to 2011 and 2012 to 2016.

“The yen is the most ‘safe-haven’ of ‘safe-haven’ currencies, with the Swiss franc and U.S. dollar vying for second place,” the Goldman analysis found. “At the other end of the spectrum, a number of different emerging-market currencies vie for the title of most ‘risk-on’ currency. These correlations appear relatively stable over time, with the notable exception of some of the U.S. dollar’s relationships.”

The US private sector created less than expected jobs last month, suggesting that job creation started to cool after strong gains registered earlier. The ADP National Employment Report released on Thursday showed companies added 158K new jobs to the economy in June, following the preceding month’s downwardly revised figure of 230K and surpassing analysts’ expectations for an 185K increase.