The Fed’s June minutes showed a 3.6% policy rate and an even split among 18 submitted projections over whether rates should rise or stay flat or fall by year-end. AI infrastructure demand appeared as a new inflation pressure point.
WTI climbed 4.16% to $73.37 and Brent rose 4.23% to $77.30 after President Trump said the Iran memorandum of understanding was “over.” The move followed a U.S. revocation of a license tied to Iranian crude sales.
June nonfarm payrolls rose 57,000, below the 115,000 economist forecast cited by MarketWatch, while the unemployment rate eased to 4.2%. BLS also revised April and May payrolls down by a combined 74,000.
U.S. private payrolls rose by 98,000 in June, below the 110,000 Wall Street Journal consensus cited in market coverage and down from 122,000 in May. The miss puts Friday's official payrolls release and Fed rate-risk pricing back at the center of cross-asset trading.
WTI crude rose from a $69.23 settlement to $70.24 in after-hours trading after U.S. Central Command said it struck Iranian missile, drone-storage and coastal-radar sites. Brent moved from $71.99 to about $72.98 as traders repriced Strait of Hormuz risk.
The BEA said May headline PCE inflation rose 4.1% from a year earlier, while core PCE reached 3.4%. Monthly PCE prices increased 0.4%, keeping the Fed’s preferred inflation gauge well above its 2% target.
China Resources New Energy is set to raise about RMB24.5B, roughly $3.6B, in Shenzhen after pricing at RMB10.11 a share. The online retail tranche was oversubscribed 683 times, according to Chinese market disclosures cited by FT.
About 16 million barrels of oil moved through the Strait of Hormuz in one day, according to Vice President JD Vance, even as Iran said the route was closed again. The dispute puts a 60-day U.S.-Iran negotiating window back at the center of oil-supply risk.
USD/JPY reached 161.80 on June 19, according to CNBC, marking the yen’s weakest level since July 2024 and putting intervention risk back on traders’ screens after the Bank of Japan’s rate move.
The Bank of England held Bank Rate at 3.75% in a 7-2 vote, with Megan Greene and Huw Pill backing a 25 bp hike to 4%. The June minutes point to 2.8% CPI, tighter financial conditions and energy-price volatility as the policy trade-off.
The Bank of Japan raised its money-market guideline to around 1.0%, a 25 bp move from 0.75%, with a 7-1 Policy Board vote. The statement tied the move to faster crude-oil pass-through, rising medium- to long-term inflation expectations and still-negative real rates.
WTI crude settled 3.2% lower at $84.88 and Brent lost 3.4% to $87.33 after a senior Trump administration official put the odds of a U.S.-Iran Hormuz reopening agreement at 80%.