Daily Currency Updates

Every so often there comes a watershed moment in the currency markets – the news that Lehman Bros had gone under, America’s AAA sovereign debt downgrade and the Swiss National Bank’s decision to introduce a minimum floor of 1.2000 for EUR CHF spring to mind in recent years. Today’s session has the potential to provide investors with...

Sometimes politicians go too far. After signs in recent months that the economic situation in Greece was stabilising and with some positive economic growth in the troubled Hellenic state firmly within sight, the nation’s leader Antonis Samaras appears to have plunged his country into a new constitutional crisis. Samaras didn’t act to end...

Last Friday’s session saw the IMF weigh into the argument on whether now is the time for the Federal Reserve to begin reducing down the $85bn per month which it continues to pump into its Quantitative Easing programme. The austere body issued a warning to US policymakers that the massive cuts to its Federal budget which President...

The twin highlights of today’s session come in the form of this morning’s whole of eurozone CPI inflation data for last month and this afternoon’s US Michigan Sentiment Index. The figures from either side of the Atlantic have one common thread – they are both highly likely to have a bearing on investors’ thoughts on the likely...

Last night’s Asian session brought considerable volatility for the Anipodean Dollars following key risk events in both Australia and New Zealand and a potentially game-changing announcement from the World Bank regarding the future prospects of the Chinese economy. As expected, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand announced in the early hours...

The Pound Sterling was one of the best-performing of the sixteen most-actively traded global currencies during yesterday’s session, largely thanks to an encouraging NIESR GDP growth estimate for the UK economy, published just before the European equities close. The closely-watched prediction of the level of economic activity in the British...

Perhaps the most notable development in the global currency markets during yesterday’s session acme in the form of an announcement from leading credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s. The organisation, which is one of the three big global credit grading bureau, revealed just before the European equities close that it had raised its...

Saturday’s Chinese trade data for May has had a markedly different effect on the Antipodean Dollars. Ordinarily, analysts would expect the high-yielding Australian and New Zealand Dollars to behave in a broadly similar fashion to the import/export numbers from the world’s second largest economy. The Chinese figures showed a significantly...

Today is Non-Farm Payrolls Friday and rarely has the closely-watched gauge of the level of job creation in the world’s premier economy been so eagerly anticipated. The reason behind this is primarily the content of the recent rhetoric emanating from the US’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, which noted in the minutes of its most recent...

Yesterday’s North American session brought wild fluctuations in the value of several of the sixteen most-actively traded currencies, with the high-yielders, in particular, taking a pounding. The shift in market sentiment was driven by the prevailing ‘risk off’ trading environment, which saw global shares give up a significant amount of...