Asia Morning Bites: Korean Trade Data, Powell's Testimony, and Global Market Trends"

Asia Morning Bites

Early Korean Trade data showed a surprise gain in June, and a separate release also shows pipeline price pressures diminishing. Jerome Powell starts his 2-day testimony to the US Congress.

 

Global Macro and Markets

Global markets: US stocks returned from vacation to resume their decline, though didn’t fall much and firmed up a bit after opening lower. The NASDAQ fell just 0.16% and the S&P 500 lost 0.47% on the day. Equity futures remain negative though, so more declines beckon today. Chinese stocks also fell. The CSI 300 was also only slightly down but the Hang Seng index fell 1.54%. US Treasury yields declined slightly too. The yield on the 2Y note fell 2.9bp to 4.685%, while 10Y yields fell 4.1bp to 3.721%.

 

EURUSD is almost unchanged from this time yesterday at about 1.0922, after testing both higher and lower. The AUD is lower though, falling to 0.6788. GBP is also a bit weaker ahead of this week’s Bank of England rate hike. But the JPY has rallied a bit, moving to 141.308, down from a high of 142.251 yesterday. The PHP also made some gains yesterday, though most of the Asian pack made slight losses against the USD yesterday. The TWD and CNY were both down about 0.25-0.3%. USDCNY is now 7.1809.

G-7 macro: US housing starts and permits jumped strongly in May. The annualized rate of starts jumped from 1340 thousand to 1631 thousand. And permits were also stronger, suggesting more gains in the pipeline.

 

There isn’t much else on the macro calendar today, apart from Jerome Powell who will testify in front of Congress today for the start of his 2-day grilling. So expect plenty of headlines from that, although we doubt he will stray too far from the June FOMC comments. There’s also a fairly packed ECB schedule of speakers today to provide a variety of views on how high terminal rates for the Eurozone will be, and just as importantly, when they will reach that point.

South Korea: Early June exports (1-20 days) rebounded 5.3%YoY – the first gain in ten months. As expected, chip exports (-23.5%) and exports to China (-12.5%) were particularly weak while exports to the US rose firmly (18.4%), probably due to robust auto exports. Korea’s exports have bottomed out from the fourth quarter of last year, but the recovery has been pretty shallow. Imports dropped -11.2% during the period on the back of falling global commodity prices. We believe that the trade balance will return to a surplus by the end of the third quarter.

Meanwhile, price pressures continue to diminish as producer price inflation decelerated to 0.6%YoY in May from 1.6% in April. PPI declined 0.3% MoM (nsa) after a 0.1% drop in April. This morning, the government announced that there would be no electricity fee hike for the third quarter. As we argued earlier, ahead of the national election in April next year, it is likely that electricity rates will be held steady. As global commodity prices have fallen sharply, this would also support the freezing of electricity fees.

 

We look for consumer price inflation to reach the 2%-3% range from June

We forecast a 2.7% YoY rate for inflation in June (vs 3.3% in May) and for inflation to stay in this range until the end of this year. Pipeline prices suggest price declines continue due to falling global commodity prices and recent KRW appreciation. Import prices have already dropped for three months in a row and producer prices are expected to fall in YoY terms from June. Thus, we believe that the Bank of Korea will take a pause on hiking in 3Q24. Currently, we have marked a rate cut in 4Q23, but depending on the Fed’s rate cut timing, the BoK’s cut may come later, perhaps in the first quarter of next year. But, for now, we are keeping our current BoK forecast as it is.

 

What to look out for: Powell's testimony before US congress

South Korea PPI (21 June)

Australia Westpac leading index (21 June)

US MBA mortgage applications (21 June)

Fed’s Powell speaks (21 June)

Fed’s Goolsbee speaks (21 June)

Philippines BSP policy meeting (22 June)

Indonesia BI policy meeting (22 June)

US initial jobless claims (22 June)

Fed’s Waller, Bowman and Mester speak (22 June)

Japan CPI inflation and Jibun PMI (23 June)

Singapore CPI inflation (23 June)

Thailand trade balance (23 June)

Fed’s Barkin and Bullard speak (23 June)