Reacting to Nvidia’s Sales Leap while Awaiting U.S. Employment Situation Report and Japanese Fiscal Stimulus

November 20, 2025

News of a 62% year-on-year leap in Nvidia sales ignited a solid rebound in U.S. equities. At 08:00 in pre-open futures trading, the Nasdaq and S&P 500 were showing rebounds of 1.7% and 1.2%.

Investors are also awaiting the belated September jobs data to be released in 30 minutes but also seven weeks after such would have been revealed had there not been a 43-day federal government shutdown. Street expectations are that the figures will show a rise of around 50k jobs, unchanged 4.3% rates of unemployment and wage growth a tad above 3.5%.

With dollar yen approaching 158 and showing an overnight further advance of 0.5%, currency markets are on Japanese intervention alert. The psychological 160 per dollar level in particular looms as a red line that will not be crossed without eliciting intervention support. The Bank of Japan is on record as prepared to resume interest rate hikes, and Prime Minister Takaichi is scheduled to announce a fiscal stimulus Friday that will include 20 trillion or more of fresh money. All this comes against the backdrop of the tensest geopolitical relations between Japan and China in quite some time.

In overnight financial market action, the dollar has also risen 0.2% versus the Swiss franc and 0.1% against the euro, Canadian dollar, Korean won and Mexican peso. The greenback also slid 0.1% relative to the Aussie dollar and sterling and by 0.3% vis-a-vis New Zealand’s currency.

Stock markets closed up 3.2% in Taiwan, 2.7% in Japan, 1.9% in South Korea and 1.2% in Australia. The Shanghai Composite index lost 0.4%, by contrast. Key European share prices or 0.6-0.9% firmer so far. Among ten-year sovereign debt yields, today has seen across-the-board rises of five basis points in Japan, three bps in France and Italy, two bps in Spain and Germany and a single basis point in the 10-year Treasury yield.

Bitcoin and oil are up 0.2% and 0.6%, while gold has slipped marginally.

Consumer confidence measures for November were reported today in several European economies, showing a 49-month high in Belgium, a 45-month high in Slovenia, a 14-month high in the Netherlands and 5-month high in Turkey. But the Danish sentiment index printed at a 32-month low.

Chinese central bank officials as expected left the 1-year and 5-year Loan Prime Rates unchanged at 3.0% and 3.5%, respectively. Their last change, a decrease of 10 basis points, occurred back in May. The recent trade deal with the U.S. has removed any inclination to ease monetary policy in the short term.

U.S. Jobs Data Just In: A 119k September increase in nonfarm payroll jobs was almost twice expectations even after adjusting for the combined 33k downward revision to the change in jobs that occurred in July and August. But the broad picture of recent jobs growth remains a weak one, averaging just +40k per month over the past five reported months. Also, the jobless rate inched unexpectedly 0.1 percentage point higher to a 47-month high of 4.4%. The new level represents a full percentage point increase from the 3.4% cyclical low touched in March 2023. On-year average hourly earnings growth of 3.8% was at a 4-month high and also somewhat above market expectations. This perpetuates the Fed’s dilemma of continuing above-target inflation but a softening labor market. There’s also some ambiguity about just how weak the labor market really is since labor supply has been shrinking along with labor demand. Labor force participation printed at a 4-month high of 62.4% in September, and other figures also released today from the Labor Dept show new jobless claims falling to a lower-than-forecast 220k last week.

The orders subindex within the British industrial trends monthly survey from November printed at -37, just a single point above October’s 10-month low.

Construction output in the euro area fell 0.5% in September, its biggest monthly divot since May and resulting in the largest 12-month decrease in six months. Third quarter construction merely matched the second quarter’s average level.

Quarterly Danish GDP in 3Q of 2.3% was double the prior quarter’s pace and associated with the fastest year-on-year increase (3.9%) since the final quarter of 2024.

Among price data released around the world this Thursday, consumer price inflation in Hong Kong accelerated to a 4-month high in October of 1.2%, still not far from July’s 49-month low of 1.0%.

German producer prices edged up 0.1% on month in October, yielding a 1.8% year-on-year decline after -1.7% in September and representing the eighth straight sub-zero result.

Estonian PPI inflation last month was just 0.6%. Such previously had dived from 33.7% in May 2022 to -4.4% at end-2023.

Canadian producer price inflation, in contrast, accelerated further last month to a 34-month high of 6.0% from a 2025 low of just 1.3% touched in May.

Indonesia experienced its largest quarterly current account surplus in the past two years ($4.05 billion in 3Q 2025). In calendar year 2024, there was a deficit of $8.7 billion, by comparison.

Based on their improved inflation outlook, policymakers at the South African Reserve Bank unanimously decided to cut their repo rate by a further 25 basis points to 6.75% and bringing the cumulative drop since September 2024 to 150 basis points. “Because of downside surprises [in recent inflation data results], together with a stronger rand, and a lower oil price assumption, we have small downward revisions to our inflation outlook, for both 2025 and 2026. We remain on track to deliver 3% inflation over the medium term.”

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on Thursday, November 20th, 2025 at 7:25 am and is filed under New Overnight Developments Abroad – Daily Update.
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