(Kitco News) – Gold is ending the week on the front foot as the precious metal pushed 0.89% higher overnight. Despite this, the risk sentiment has been very mixed during the Asian session as the Nikkei 225 has fallen 0.12%, while Australia’s ASX trades flat. Another thing that could have affected the gold market was Chinese markets opening again. Their indices played catch up and opened higher with the Shanghai Composite closing 1.68% higher.
Overnight there was some data to digest, Japanese household spending missed consensus estimates of 3.2% to print at 1.7% for the month of August. Elsewhere, Chinese services PMI came in marginally higher than last months reading of 54 to hit 54.8. The big news came from the White House who announced the are shifting their stance on fiscal stimulus again as Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin apparently told House Speaker Pelosi that Trump wanted an agreement on a comprehensive stimulus package.
Elsewhere in the commodities sector, silver has pushed just over 2% higher and platinum is having a great start to the session up around 1.31%. In FX markets, the US continues to underperform against some of the EM currencies. USD/CNY is currently one of the worst-performing pairs trading 1.10% lower overnight. The New Zealand dollar is the clear outperformer and trades half a percent higher against the greenback overnight.
The UK GDP came in slightly higher than some had predicted in August, as the continued reopening of some key sectors pushed GDP by 2.1% on the month. There was some negative news from this round of data as manufacturing and industrial production readings Manufacturing Production for August printed at 0.7% vs analyst expectation of 3.0%, while Industrial Production sunk to 0.3% against the mean consensus of 2.5%.
Later in the session, the market will get the latest employment change data from Canada and this weekend Trump is set to hold a Republican rally.