The Federal Reserve delivered an expected quarter point rate cut on Wednesday and an end to its "quantitative tightening" this year. But Chair Jerome Powell ruffled bond market feathers by saying another cut in December was not a "foregone conclusion".
"Far from it", he added.
Treasury yields and the dollar firmed heading into Thursday's trading day, with markets now seeing only a 70% chance of another Fed cut by year-end. Wall Street indexes stalled after the Fed move and futures remained subdued overnight.
The Bank of Japan, meanwhile, deferred any further interest rate rises for now - knocking the yen back to eight-month lows despite pressure from U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent earlier this week for the BOJ to keep on tightening.
In South Korea, President Donald Trump hailed his summit with Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping in Busan as "amazing" and gave it a 12 out of 10 rating. But markets seemed less impressed, initially at least.
The two sides laid out a 12-month agreement that removes the cliff edge of 100% U.S. tariffs next week, seeing Washington halve fentanyl-related tariffs on China to 10% in return for Beijing freeing up rare earth exports and pledging to buy more U.S. soya beans. No mention was made of allowing China to import Nvidia's cutting-edge AI chip Blackwell, despite Trump indicating on Wednesday that it would be on the agenda.
China's stocks and yuan fell back as readouts from the meeting unfolded.
Just before the summit, Trump threw another geopolitical curve ball by ordering the U.S. military to immediately resume testing nuclear weapons after a gap of 33 years.
Meantime, the market reaction to this week's first sweep of megacap tech earnings was also something of a mixed bag.
With AI-related investments still booming despite ongoing fears of a bubble in valuations, Alphabet outshone Microsoft and Meta and its stock jumped 7% ahead of today's bell on another beat - lifting its capex plan for the year to $91-93 billion.
Microsoft and Meta shares went the other direction, however, dropping 3% and 7% respectively overnight. Meta's copybook was blotted by a hefty $16 billion tax charge and Microsoft's forecast of rising spending seemed to unnerve those wary of the cost of sustaining the boom. An outage on Thursday in its Azure cloud computing platform didn't help, even though it appears to have been resolved overnight.
Next up on the corporate diary are Apple and Amazon results after Thursday's close.
Elsewhere, the European Central Bank is expected to leave its key interest rates unchanged at 2% today, with euro zone GDP growth for the third quarter coming in slightly ahead of forecasts thanks to an unexpected French beat. And after Wednesday's election, the next Dutch government looks likely to exclude the far right after support surged for the centrist D66 party.
Sterling's eye-catching slide to its lowest in more than two years against the euro is ostensibly on rising speculation of another Bank of England rate cut this year and possible income tax rises at next month's budget. Prime Minister Keir Starmer rejected calls for a probe into finance minister Rachel Reeves' failure to secure the correct paperwork for a house rental.
