The dollar registered strong gains across the board yesterday on a surge in so called ‘safe-haven’ flows as the negative sentiment that has dominated the market all week continues.
Overnight, the latest Beige Book from the Federal Reserve confirmed that the US economy grew at a "moderate" pace in March and early April, an improvement from the "modest to moderate" rate seen the month before.
Recent US economic data has disappointed after a better start to the year for the US economy and some analysts predict that as a result of the latest slowdown, the Federal Reserve may now not be as keen to tighten policy.
To compound the negative sentiment dominating the markets this week, which as seen four straight days of losses for most stock exchanges and a sharp sell-off in commodity prices, data from the second largest economy in the world China is also coming in below expectations and yesterday, Zhang Ke, a senior auditor with accounting firm ShinWing said in an interview that China’s local government debt is out of control and could trigger a larger financial crisis than the US housing market crash.
Zhang said "We audited some local government bond issues and found them very dangerous, so we pulled out. Most don’t have strong debt servicing abilities. Things could become very serious."
The International Monetary Fund (IMF) has raised concerns recently about Chinese government debt, it is still very unusual for an established figure in the nation’s financial industry like Zhang to make such a statement.
Credit ratings agency Fitch last week cut China’s sovereign credit rating. Fellow agency Moody’s also cut its outlook for China’s rating from ‘positive’ to ‘stable’ on Tuesday.
In the UK yesterday, the pound suffered after the publication of worse than expected UK employment data whilst the Bank of England's (BOE) minutes from its latest policy meeting two weeks ago show that the central bank remains split over whether to increase its asset purchase programme, commonly known as quantitative Easing beyond its £375 billion limit.
For the third month in a row, Governor Mervyn King failed to garner more support for a £25 billion increase in the QE program.
Analysts at Barclays suggested that "an exercise that clarified points of political ambiguity but did not imply any change in the policy stance".
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