USD’s across-the-board rally

EUR/USD

The single currency keeps falling against the dollar. The governors of the world’s global CBs in their speeches only emphasized the divergence between the US and EU policies, whereas Madame Yellen was less mild about the monetary policy prospects mainly due to the rather favourable employment statistics in the recent months. Of course, here we should take into account that the strongest data were on the employment/unemployment rate, while the earnings growth and participation rate were obviously far from perfect. But this way or another the EU affairs are much worse. If the US unemployment shrank by 3.8%, the EU one more…

USD grows with money coming back to the markets

EUR/USD

Yesterday the single currency continued its impressive descent. Earlier we mentioned that it was walking a tightrope close to 1.33. This morning the pair has fallen to 1.3240, which is the lowest level since last September. The selling impulse strengthened due to the release of FOMC’s meeting minutes at the end of July. They focused on advantages of earlier rate increase. They consist in the fact that later a smaller rate increase will be needed and it means that there won’t be a necessity to cool the economy. The smooth monetary policy is the major priority of the world’s CBs. In more…

Geopolitics strikes at the markets

EUR/USD

The safe assets are again appreciating. At night Obama permitted air strikes at Iraq, which certainly intensified the geopolitical tension in Eurasia. Ukraine and Russia, Gaza and Israel, Syria and Libya – all these countries are a cause for concern not only among cautious traders already. During yesterday’s press-conference the ECB President Mario Draghi often mentioned sharp strengthening of the geopolitical risks in the region, which tells negatively on the EU economy and puts pressure on the euro. Most likely, the negative, caused by the restriction of the commodity and money flow due to the EU sanctions and Russia’s counter measures, more…

Germany can’t save everyone

EUR/USD

Italy is again suffering recession. It became obvious after yesterday’s release of the Prelim PMI data for the second quarter. The statistics indicated the economic slowdown by 0.2% in 2Q after the decline by 0.1% in 1Q. Actually, over the last three years Italy reported only one quarter of growth – the last quarter of 2013. All the rest of the time the economy was suffering sluggish weakening. Even some decrease in the unemployment rate since the beginning of the year doesn’t save the situation. 12.3% is still too high to rely on the growth of consumer activity. Even the foreign more…

Suspension of USD’s rally

EUR/USD

The employment statistics proved to less favourable than expected. The labour market created 209K of jobs instead of the expected 230. The private sector employment increased by 198K against the forecasted growth by 225K. The average earnings haven’t grown against the previous month, which anyway hasn’t posed an obstacle for growth of the annual rate from 1.9% to 2.0%. But still it is worse than the supposed acceleration to 2.2%. It seems that employers don’t hurry to raise earnings despite the impressive increase in the number of jobs. Possibly, the reason is that there is a huge number of potential workers, more…