Risk-off sentiment on the weekly open

Market Update

US equity markets have opened the new trading week heavily in the red, after President Biden’s Build Back Better plan has been derailed, sending shock waves through stock markets.

The Dow Jones, S&P 500 and the Nasdaq all fell during the US Sunday evening session as the United States Senator Manchin has said he is a no to US President Biden’s ‘Build Back Better’ huge spending plan.

Goldman Sachs has already cut their US GDP forecasts in response to the Manchin news. While Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has said she hopes for better in 2022, which basically means the Democrats are admitting defeat for now.

Risk-off is also impacting the market as the spread of the Omicron variant intensified over the weekend and saw countries, such as the UK and France tighten restrictions, and The Netherlands announcing strict lockdown until mid-January.

Germany, the powerhouse economy of Europe, has ruled out a lockdown ahead of Christmas. The GER40 is not taking this as a plus and is heavily in the red at the start of the week.

UK Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak and other government ministers there have also said they do not want lockdowns in the UK ahead of Christmas. News reports indicated UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson is considering requesting people limit their movements over the holiday period, and this is certainly weighing on the pound.

Elsewhere, The People’s Bank of China today cut its one-year Loan Prime Rate (LPR) by a tiny 5bps, from 3.85% to 3.80%. This is the first cut to the rate since April of 2020 and was probably in reaction to fear over China’s property markets and a slowing economy.

Oil is not impressed with the PBOC cut and is basically under pressure today over the new lockdown news coming out from the Netherlands. Basically, the market fears a lack of oil demand if other European and western nations follow these lockdown measures and implement their own.

Day Ahead

The economic calendar is extremely quiet now the PBOC meeting is out the way today. Financial markets are likely to focus on the news lockdown measures, and to a larger extent, the ramifications of the Build Back Better deal not going through over the weekend.

In terms of trades, the EURUSD pair is starting to break down and worth watching today, additionally, a number of indices in Europe, such as the GER40 and CAC40 have interesting double-top patterns after Friday’s big reversal.