It looks like ECB is beating BoE in the race of hawkish surprise in a jam-packed day. Sterling spiked higher after four of the nine MPC members have indeed voted for a larger hike of 50bps. However, there was no clear follow through buying as BoE indicated there will only be "some further modest tightening " ahead. On the other hand, ECB President Christine Lagarde admitted in the post-meeting press conference that inflation surprises caused unanimous concerns in the Governing Council. More importantly, she refused to repeat the talk that a rate hike in 2022 remain highly likely. It seems that Lagarde is leaving the door open to a change in forward guidance in March to reflect the chance of a rate hike within this year. Elsewhere in the forex markets, Dollar is recovery mildly today but remains the weakest one for the week, followed by Yen. Aussie is still the strongest but it's path would depend on overall risk sentiment. Technically, a major focus now is whether EUR/GBP could ride on the u-turn to power through 0.8421 resistance, to pave the way for bullish trend reversal just ahead of 0.8276 key long term support. In Europe, at the time of writing, FTSE is down -0.14%. DAX is down -0.28%. CAC is down -0.07%. Germany 10-year yield is up 0.039 at 0.081, marching towards 0.1 handle. Earlier in Asia, Nikkei dropped -1.06%. Japan 10-year JGB yield rose 0.001 to 0.180. Singapore Strait Times rose 2.04%. Hong Kong and China were on holiday. | 