US equities ended mildly higher overnight but continued to lose upside momentum. DJIA gained 21.57 pts or 0.12% while S&P 500 gained 2.02 pts or 0.10%. Asian indices, except Japan, opened generally lower. Meanwhile, dollar index also recovered as two Fed officials signaled that April rate hike is still a possibility. Atlanta Fed president Dennis Lockhart said that "there is sufficient momentum evidenced by the economic data to justify a further step at one of the coming meetings, possibly as early as the meeting scheduled for end of April".
San Francisco Fed president John Williams said that "all else equal, assuming everything else is basically the same and the data flow continues the way I hope and expect, then April or June would definitely be potential times to have an increase in interest rates."
ECB governing council member Erkki Liikanen said that "taking into account the current inflation outlook, our policy rates are expected to remain at present or lower levels for an extended period of time, and well past the horizon of the asset purchases." And, "If the outlook or financing conditions deteriorate, the ECB still has capacity to boost inflation and growth."
From Japan, manufacturing manufacturing dropped to 49.1 in March, down fro 50.1 and missed expectation of 50.6. That's the first contraction reading since April 2015. In particular, the new export orders index tumbled sharply to 45.9 from 49.0, the worst reading since January 2013. BoJ deputy governor Hiroshi Nakaso said yesterday that interest rate can "technically possible to go farther into negative territory. I don't know to what extent."
The economic calendar is rather busy today. From Australia, house price index rose 0.2% qoq in Q4. A number of sentiment indicators will be released in Eurozone, including PMIs, German Ifo and ZEW. Swiss will release trade balance. UK will release inflation data including CPI and PPI. US will release house price index.