Rise and shine everyone.

It’s a relatively quiet day with the major focus of the week being the Jackson Hole Symposium. The main focus will be Chair Powell speaking on Friday. But, other central bankers will also be delivering speeches, including BoJ’s Governor Ueda, also on Friday.

The JPY made another sizable move this morning, hitting 145.24 at one point. The speculation is that FedSpeak about cutting rates in September sparked this move. Basically, the idea is that closing the gap between US Yields and Japanese Yields leads to the strengthening of the currency. But the JPY wasn’t the only one. The USD weakened against the Korean Won, and other Asian currencies.

Markets in China are moving higher. There was news about the CCP adding further support measures. Although this morning, Bloomberg released news that China was no longer going to publish stats of foreign fund flows from the Chinese exchanges. That can’t be a good sign. The main focus for China today will be the Loan Prime Rate decision at 9:15 pm ET.

European Stocks are mixed this morning. Defense stocks are getting hit after Germany declared that they would not support new requests for aid to Ukraine amid government spending cuts.

US Equity Futures are muted this morning. Natural Gas is higher but, Crude is pulling back. Silver is higher but Gold is pulling back. There are some ceasefire talks in the Middle East.

Goldman Sachs has revised down the probability of recession for the US from 25% to 20% now.

Palo Alto reports after the close today.

Chart of the Day

While we’ve seen a significant move in Gold, call options positioning is not crowded. This suggests that the move was not on high conviction and / or investors are yet to fully catch on to that trend.

Another interesting update from GS - The VIX has declined more than the VVIX which suggests, the volatility of volatility persists.

Calendars

(news taken from Reuters, FT, Bloomberg; Calendar from Trading Economics)