Italy re-submitted its draft budget for next year to the European Commission with the same growth and deficit assumptions but with falling debt, the new draft showed.At 3:49 p.m. (2049 GMT), the euro was up 0.34 percent at $1.13255, erasing an earlier loss tied partly to weak regional growth data.
The British pound rebounded from its lows of the day on Wednesday after Prime Minister Theresa May said she had obtained enough support for her proposed Brexit deal to move forward.
Sterling traded 0.2 percent higher at $1.2999 as of 2:22 p.m. ET after breaking below $1.29 earlier in the day.
An index that tracks the dollar versus a basket of six major currencies was down 0.45 at 96.867 after hitting a 16-month high of 97.693 on Monday.
· Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that the introduction of press conferences after every Fed meeting next year means all meetings are now “live” for possible rate increases.
“The market is going to have to get used to that,” Powell said of the fact that the Fed may now raise rates at any of its eight regular policy meetings, and not just the four at which it had been holding press conferences in the past.
· Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell says the U.S. economy is performing well but he’s eyeing potential risks ahead.
Those include a slowdown in global growth, the fading impact from tax cuts and the cumulative weight of the Fed’s own interest rate hikes.
Speaking Wednesday to an audience at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas, Powell said the Fed is managing interest rates in an effort to prolong the current economic recover.
The Federal Reserve is watching signs of a slowdown in the housing industry and monitoring levels of corporate debt even as it remains confident in the economy’s continued growth, Fed chair Jerome Powell said on Wednesday.
“There are a lot of factors weighing on home building right now. Material costs, labor scarcity ... It is rates as well,” with the costs of home mortgages rising, Powell said. While leverage and other credit indicators are healthy overall, “there is some significant corporate borrowing and we have our eyes on that.”
He said the increased political attacks on the Fed will not divert the central bank from doing its job.
· A U.S. congressional commission said on Wednesday that China appears to have relaxed enforcement of sanctions on North Korea and called on the Treasury Department to provide a report on Chinese compliance within180 days.
In its annual report, the U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission said the Treasury report should include a classified list of Chinese financial institutions, businesses, and officials involved in trading with North Korea that could be subject to future sanctions.
· China has delivered a written response to U.S. demands for wide-ranging trade reforms, three U.S. government sources said on Wednesday, a move that could trigger negotiations to bring an end to a withering trade war between the world’s top economies.
Trump is expected to meet Chinese President Xi Jinping on the sidelines of a G20 summit in Argentina at the end of November and in early December.
· British Prime Minister Theresa May won the backing of her senior ministers for a draft European Union divorce deal on Wednesday, freeing her to tackle the much more perilous struggle of getting parliament to approve the agreement.
But the weakest British leader in a generation now faces the ordeal of trying to push her deal through parliament, where opponents lined up to castigate the agreement, even before reading it.
· Oil rose about 1 percent on Wednesday, recouping some of the previous session’s heavy sell-off, on growing prospects that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and allied producers would cut output at a meeting next month to prop up prices.
Brent crude LCOc1 settled up 65 cents, or 1 percent, at $66.12 a barrel, after hitting a session high of $67.63.
U.S. crude futures CLc1 rose 56 cents, or 1.01 percent, to settle at $56.25 a barrel, after sliding for 12 straight sessions to the lowest since November 2017.
Reference: Reuters, Seattle Times
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