FOMC faces headwinds

EUR/USD

USD fell under pressure yesterday after the release of the FOMC’s meeting minutes in October. Then the Committee stopped bond purchases, so market participants expected to see the discussion if it was reasonable in the minutes. Among the voting members there was only one dissident – Narayana Kocherlakota, who appealed for further QE until inflation reached the target rates. It is an extremely dovish position, but it was long known to the market and so didn’t arouse any surprise. The minutes were remarkable for comments that inflation would remain low for a while despite the large-scale quantitative easing, which was already more…

False dip of the greenback

EUR/USD

USD’s growth at the beginning of the US session last Friday could be easily accounted for by the desire to lock in profits. For that reason market participants selected the first coming macroeconomic report as a cause to lock in profits. The newsfeeds say that they hurried to sell the dollar on the message about  increase in business inventories by 0.3%. But in our opinion, it’s hardly reasonable. This growth of business inventories, in accord with some surveys, met the expectations. Moreover, the news releases before and after the business inventories report were also better than expected. And they were of more…

USD is growing non-stop

EUR/USD

Euro-bulls were disappointed. Those, who bet that the ECB’s differences wouldn’t let Draghi continue with policy easing, proved to be wrong. Yes, we also were of that opinion, so a sharp drop of the single currency from the current levels proved to be a kind of surprise to us as we had expected some consolidation near 1.2500. Besides, the US employment data, which initially had passed unnoticed, again exceeded the expectations. The number of weekly unemployment claims had shrunk by the beginning of November to 278k. Moreover, the number of continuing claims decreased dramatically and hit a multi-year low yesterday. In more…

EUR clings to 1.2500

EUR/USD

Euro-bears almost reached the preceding lows in the pair. EURUSD dropped down to 1.2456 during the day, yet the weekly low of 1.2437 was left untouched. While the morning weakness could be accounted for by the disappointing rates of the EU Final PMIs, the pair’s recovery during the US session could hardly be explained by any fundamental factors. But let’s relate everything in due order. The Services PMI and Composite PMIs for Italy and France proved to be in the green zone, besides the Italian activity in the services sector even became more intense in comparison with the previous month, which more…

Out of control

EUR/USD

The single currency has again fallen under pressure today. On Monday the pair hit a fresh 26-month low at 1.2438. Then the pair was in moderate demand and grew to 1.2575 at some point. Against the global growth of the dollar the single currency got support from messages that Mario Draghi’s colleagues are displeased with his management style and are trying to restrain his intention to continue easing the policy till the end of the year. In the recent weeks speculations have been around the dilemma whether the ECB will launch a programme of quantitative easing or abstain from it. The more…