An official from the Japanese Finance Ministry said on Monday, they will keep monitoring the forex developments with a sense of urgency. The official, however, said that he cannot comment on the reasons behind FX moves, on the US election impact as well as on the level of FX itself. 

Business sentiment of Japanese manufacturers and service-sector firms was the least pessimistic in nine months in November, likely as the world’s third-largest economy showed signs of pulling out of a corona virus-induced recession. But both sectors believed conditions will remain negative over the coming months, highlighting the struggle to completely shake off the drag from COVID-19, according to the monthly Reuters Tankan, which tracks the Bank of Japan’s (BOJ) closely watched tankan quarterly survey.

In the poll of 485 large- and mid-sized companies, in which 225 firms responded on condition of anonymity, many complained about the pandemic’s lingering impact, and negative comments about business conditions outnumbered positive ones.

On the other hand, cases of the novel corona virus in the United States have surpassed 10 million. However, this is not new news as according to Worldometer, as of Friday, there were already 10,058,586 confirmed cases of COVID-19 in the US.

According to the same chart, 242,230 people have died from the virus in the US and 6,391,208 have recovered so far from a population of some 327,200,000.This, therefore, equates to around 3% of the country that has already been infected and tested positive.

However, the real number is unknown as there will be people that have had the virus and were asymptomatic or were not tested, so that number could be higher. Nevertheless, the risk of lockdowns is real as the President select has the corona virus as a number one priority to deal with. He is supposed to select a task force as soon as Monday in the US.

He said in his victory speech that “Our work begins with getting Covid under control.”

“I will spare no effort, none, or any commitment to turn around this pandemic,” Mr. Biden said Saturday.

USD/JPY 4 Hours Chart:

Support: 103.07 (S1), 102.83 (S2), 102.49 (S3).

Resistance: 103.65 (R1), 104.00 (R2), 104.24 (R3).

In the prevailing market condition, we expect a mixed trend for USD/JPY.