ASIA MORNING: Can't Stop Won't Stop

Vision of a missile attack on downed Ukrainian airliner has failed to escalate geopolitical risk premiums across risk assets. The resurgence in equities from Wednesday's lows has sustained, with major US benchmarks edging higher overnight led by new highs in Microsoft (MSFT) and Apple (AAPL). Ultimately, the familiar game plan employed by Trump to create chaos and then de-escalate seems to be working to great effect, with S&P 500, Nasdaq and ASX 200 keeping on an unabated climb to new all-time highs, and Crude and Gold shedding earlier-in-the-week risk-off flows. 
 

Some risk in the calendar lies ahead with Aussie Retail Sales out at 11.30am AEDT. Consensus forecasts pit the number at 0.4%, a minor improvement on the prior month's 0%. Retail sales have clearly been sluggish as of late judging by results since mid-2019, setting the precedent for the RBA to maintain its low interest rate experiment. Therefore, a 25bps cut in February appears likely with the RBA flagging consumption as a key worry to the Aussie economy. AUDUSD has underperformed the broader risk recovery, remaining range-bound between 0.685 and 0.688 - and noticeably - under its 200d-MA resistance.
 

USDCAD made waves after outgoing BoC Governor Poloz highlighted positive developments affronting the Canadian economy. He cited a slight recovery in trade, better labour market and housing rebound that looks to continue. With the BoC not set to meet until Jan-22, market pricing expects a slim chance that the major overnight cash rate in Canada gets slashed. This bodes well for USDCAD, which evidently, has strengthened 50 pips overnight in the CAD direction.