‘Good Luck, We’re All Counting On You’: Full Week Preview

To be sure, whatever you thought was going to dominate the news flow in the week ahead is probably going to take a backseat to North Korea, for obvious reasons.

Pyongyang’s latest nuclear test means all eyes will be on Donald Trump’s Twitter feed and all ears will be perked up for any further statements like this one from Jim Mattis: 

Defense Secretary James Mattis with a message to America’s allies and North Korea out front of the West Wing @WhiteHouse.#USA🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/RwvTaiGoQi

— Dan Scavino Jr. (@Scavino45) September 3, 2017

So there’s the Secretary of Defense reiterating that America can wipe North Korea off the map tomorrow if need be and testing H-bombs that can purportedly be delivered via ICBMs is one way to get yourself into a lot of trouble with irrational actors like Donald Trump.

So there’s that and the early reaction in USDJPY and USDCHF reflected a palpable sense of angst among investors, although divining anything from those knee-jerk moves is notoriously difficult.

But North Korea isn’t the only thing on traders’ minds this week. Not by a long shot. There’s the debt ceiling debate and we’ll get the ECB along with the RBA (Tue), BoC (Wed), and Riksbank (Thu).

Needless to say, the ECB presents a lot of event risk for a euro that’s been the story of FX land for going on three months. Last week saw at least three attempts by policymakers to fine tune the message. On Friday alone we got Nowotny imploring traders to avoid “over-interpreting or dramatizing” the single currency’s rapid appreciation (which sent EURUSD higher into NFP) and then just hours later, some “euro-area officials familiar with the matter” were out saying that the governing council may not be ready to finalize their decision on next year’s QE until December. That latter “leak” served to reverse the euro strength precipitated by the weak jobs number in the U.S. All of that just a week after Draghi didn’t mention the FX risk at Jackson Hole. 

“We expect the ECB to remove the asymmetry on its asset purchase forward guidance, introducing upside risks to the EUR, but the size of the downward revisions to their staff inflation forecast could surprise investors, introducing downside risks for EUR,” Barclays writes, in their week ahead preview, before adding that “a further risk for the currency would stem from a lack of comment on the recent EUR strength, suggesting that the ECB is willing to look through further appreciation.”