Futures Rise On Friday 13th Ahead Of Deluge Of Bank Earnings; Dollar Continues To Decline

European shares rose as Fiat rebounded on hopes concerns about parallel to Volkswagen are overblown, Asian stocks were little as Chinese shares fell to the lowest level of 2017 after poor export data, and U. S. equity-index futures rose ahead of a deluge of bank earnings. The dollar is headed for a weekly loss and gold trades at the highest price in almost two months.
On this supposedly unlucky day it’s US bank earnings that are going to be a big attraction with JPM, Wells Fargo and BofA reporting all prior to or at the open. As DB notes overnight, after the Trump trades disappointment this week – which continued yesterday – this will likely impact the overall direction of markets.
The focus this morning however has been the gloomy December trade numbers out of China which were released overnight. In US Dollar terms exports dropped -6.1% yoy in December which is a fair bit more than expected (-4.0% consensus) and also down from -1.6% in the month prior. At the same time imports shrunk to 3.1% yoy (vs. 3.0% expected) from 4.7% and so had the effect of reducing the surplus. A weaker yuan did help to cushion the fall in exports in local currency terms ( 0.6% yoy vs. -0.1% expected). The trade surplus was $40.82 billion for December, versus November’s $44.61 billion.

This post was published at Zero Hedge on Jan 13, 2017.