The Australian dollar was soft today despite a rebound of industrial production in China — Australia’s biggest trading partner. Other indicators released in China today were not good, though. There were no economic releases in Australia today, and yesterday’s employment data was mixed.
The National Bureau of Statistics of China released a report containing a bunch of important macroeconomic indicators for April. The report started with a very optimistic preamble:
In April, under the strong leadership of CPC Central Committee with Comrade Xi Jinping at its core, the whole nation coordinated efforts to advance both the epidemic prevention and control and the economic and social development. The positive momentum of domestic epidemic prevention and control was further consolidated and the resumption of work, production and market was advanced steadily. The production demand improved gradually, basic industries provided strong support and market expection was generally stable. New driving forces grew against the trend and the economy showed more vitality. Major economic indicators sustained the recovering and improving trend since March.
Indeed, the first indicator listed, industrial production, showed a strong rebound of 3.9%, year-on-year, after falling 1.1% in March. That was far stronger growth than market participants were anticipating — 1.5%. Other indicators were nowhere as good, though. That included retail sales, which dropped 7.5%, year-on-year. While that was a slowdown compared with March’s decline of 5.8%, analysts were expecting a noticeably slower decline last month — 5.9%.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics released a report on the Australian jobs market yesterday. It showed a slump of employment by 594,300 in April, even more than the pessimistic median forecast had promised — 575,000. Losses were registered in both full-time and part-time employment. On the other hand, the unemployment rate edged up from 5.2% to just 6.2% while experts were anticipating a much bigger increase to 8.3%.
AUD/USD fell from 0.6459 to 0.6429 as of 13:34 GMT today. EUR/AUD gained from 1.6713 to 1.6857. AUD/JPY dropped from 69.27 to 68.76.
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