FX Weekly
Group Economics Macro & Financial Markets Research
04 February 2016
Weak US data weigh on USD Georgette Boele Co-ordinator FX & Precious Metals Strategy Tel: +31 20 629 7789
• Weak US data weigh on the US dollar • JPY resume gains – over to you Kuroda • New Zealand dollar outperformer
georgette.boele@nl.abnamro.com
Roy Teo Senior FX Strategist
Weak US data weigh on the US dollar
Tel: +65 6597 8616
Yesterday, there were two interesting market reactions. The stronger-than-expected ADP
roy.teo@sg.abnamro.com
report failed to support the US dollar. This is because currency markets are currently biased towards negative news from the US, because this would decrease the possibility of Fed rate hikes this year. As a result, stronger data are ignored and weaker data have a more substantial negative impact on the US dollar. The weaker-than-expected Markit services PMI and ISM non-manufacturing caused a dramatic sell-off in the US dollar yesterday. EUR/USD broke the psychological level of 1.10 again and rallied to a high of 1.1146 while USD/JPY dropped to a low of 117.06 thereby fully erasing the gains after the BoJ decision last week. This morning the US dollar has remained under pressure. The ball is now back in the court of the ECB and the BoJ (see below). We expect the ECB cut its deposit rate in two steps (March and June) to -0.5% and to increase its asset purchase program by 10bn in March. This is not fully priced in by financial market.
FX Performance since last 28 January 2016 % with US dollar as basis
4 3 2 1 0 NZD
CAD
EUR
GBP
AUD
NOK
SEK
CHF
JPY
Source: Bloomberg
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