USD/JPY consolidates in a range, just above 111.00 handle

   •  Initial signs of stability undermine JPY’s safe-haven demand and helped limit the downside.
   •  Traders refrained from placing aggressive bets ahead of today’s US CPI and FOMC minutes.

The USD/JPY pair was seen oscillating in a narrow trading band through the Asian session on Wednesday, consolidating the overnight slump to over one-week lows. 

The US President Donald Trump's latest threat to slap tariffs on European goods revived fears of fresh global trade tensions. Adding to this, the IMF's downgrade of its global economic outlook provided a strong lift to the Japanese Yen's relative safe-haven status. 

This coupled with persistent US Dollar selling bias, further aggravated by the overnight sharp intraday downfall in the US Treasury bond yields, exerted some heavy downward pressure and momentarily dragged the pair to sub-111.00 level during the US trading session.

Bulls, however, showed some resilience at lower levels and assisted the pair to rebound around 15-pips from daily lows, albeit lacked strong conviction ahead of Wednesday's important releases from the US - the latest consumer inflation figures and FOMC meeting minutes. 

Meanwhile, some initial signs of stability in the global equity markets extended some support and helped limit any fresh downside, albeit the positive factor, to a larger extent, was negated by better than expected Japanese PPI figures and eventually led to a subdued/range-bound price action.

Technical levels to watch