Gold and silver are flat leading into the EU session

With the US off for a public holiday and China still closed it was a pretty quiet session overnight Gold and silver are trading pretty much flat with the yellow metal hanging near $1819.22/oz and silver holding at $27.56/oz.

The good run in equities markets continues as Japan's Nikkei 225 closed 1.28% higher and Australia's ASX pushed 0.70% in the black. Only the Indian bourses closed lower overnight in the Asia-Pac area.

In the FX space, the dollar once again underperformed with NZD/USD the top-performing pair up around 0.30%. Rates continued to climb with the US 10 year treasury yield hitting 1.228%.

Overnight there has been reports that one US service member and five civilian contractors were injured and one civilian contractor killed in Erbil, Iraq. Aljazeera reported that it was a rocket attack. US Sec State Blinken released a statement saying he was "outraged" at the attack.

The FT has reported that China are looking to attack the US by restricting the amount of rare earth materials it sends over. Rare earths are used in everything from smartphones to fighter jets.

Japan Finance Minister Aso says need to watch bond yields. Yields in the Japanese 10 year have pushed above 0% to hit 0.08% overnight.

That was not it from Japan as BoJ's Gov Kuroda says the Bank will continue its current policy to support the economy. He added "its important to increase productivity and innovation and that the bank need to pay attention to faster digitalisation"

Sticking with central banks, the RBA February meeting minutes stated that very significant monetary support is to be needed for some time. They added the cash rate to be kept at 10 bps as long as is necessary and the bank will not raise cash rate until inflation sustainably in 2-3% target band.

In the commodities markets, bad weather has sent shockwaves through the oil market in the US. According to Bloomberg, at least 5 million people across the U.S. taking turns being plunged into darkness to avoid a total collapse of their grids. More than a million barrels a day of oil and 10 billion cubic feet of gas production are shut. This sent oil prices higher with spot WTI trading just above $60/bbl.

Looking ahead to the rest of the session highlights include German ZEW data, New Zealand GDT, EU GDP and comments from Fed's Daly and Bowman
 

By Rajan Dhall

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