AUD/USD declines on negative outlook for trading neighbor China

• AUD/USD declines after the release of weak China trade data on Monday. 
• The pair recovers some of the losses after Fed’s Kashkari gives boost to rate-cut hopes. 

AUD/USD manages to claw back some of its earlier losses and climbs into the 0.6730s on Monday after trading down to 0.6700 following the release of weak Chinese export data, which negatively impacted the Australian Dollar (AUD) due to the two country’s close trade ties.

China Exports in September declined to 2.4% YoY from 8.4% previously and below the 6.0% expected, according to data from the National Bureau of Statistics of China. This contributed to a lower-than-expected and lower-than-previous Trade Balance for the month of $81.71 billion. The data added to the overall pessimistic view of the Chinese economy and investor disappointment at the lack of detail contained in a recently-unveiled fiscal stimulus program. 

In a speech on Saturday, Finance Minister Lan Fo’an withheld actual figures of the program but did announce Beijing would be launching a large-scale local government debt-swap program, and said the forthcoming stimulus package could mark a multi-year turning point in China’s fiscal policy framework.  

A contributing factor to AUD/USD’s recovery during the US session on Monday could be a speech by Federal Reserve (Fed) Bank of Minneapolis President Neel Kashkari (non-voting member) who said that it appears likely that “further modest reductions” in the central bank’s benchmark interest rate will be appropriate in the coming quarters. The expectation of lower interest rates is negative for the US Dollar (USD) since it reduces foreign capital inflows. 

That said, the FXStreet’s FedTracker, which gauges the tone of Fed officials’ speeches on a dovish-to-hawkish scale from 0 to 10 using a custom AI model, rated Kashkari’s words as neutral, with a score of 5.6. This was also above the 4.3 average for the Fed official.