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Angela Merkel scored a huge personal victory in the German elections in a stronger showing than expected. Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party fell just three seats short of that needed to achieve an outright majority in the Bundestag. Remember coalition governments are far more common on the continent. But…
GBP has improved versus USD in 8 out of the last 11 weeks. This has been fueled by skepticism surrounding Carney’s forward guidance and a firmer recovery of the UK economy that is prompting investors to think about a rate hike sooner, at least sooner than the Bank of England…
The Dollar fell against most major currencies last night, after the Federal Reserve surprised the markets by announcing no reduction to its economic stimulus program – no tapering! The US dollar dropped to a seven-month low against the Euro and its lowest level this month against the Yen. It fell…
9.30 am this morning the Bank of England MPC minutes will be released, showing how the members voted at the last MPC meeting. The markets are expecting to see that members voted unanimously to keep rates on hold with no changes in the QE program. Any data to the contrary…
Yesterday the U.S. dollar fell versus most major currencies after news broke that former U.S. Treasury Secretary, Lawrence Summers had retired from the race to become the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. So someone turned down a job – why does that impact USD? The dollar was weakened by…
Yesterdays strong employment figures from the UK gave GBP a boost, particularly against USD with cable toying with the 1.5800 mark. The number of people out of work fell by 24,000.00 in the three months to July. The headline unemployment rate thus fell from 7.8% to 7.7%. The claimant count,…
This mornings UK service sector data has surprised to the upside giving GBP a significant boost, pushing GBP up towards 1.1900 versus EUR and over 1.6000 versus USD. Today’s economic data and speeches in the US and Eurozone are likely to be insignificant compared with the events scheduled for the…
At the end of last week the Euro fell to a six week low versus USD and to a two week low versus GBP. This is ahead of this week’s European Central Bank meeting (Thursday) in which the market is now speculating the members will vote for further stimulus to…
Hold on a minute, yesterday morning GBP was falling against EUR and looked OK versus USD – so what has happened? Yesterdays Eurozone data showed that inflation is lower than expected in the monetary union, this lessens the probability or necessity for an interest rate rise in the Eurozone –…
Yesterday, the Federal Reserve announced an “as you were” policy regarding financial stimulus and repeated that they will continue to buy $85bn worth of bonds each month until the “outlook of the labour market has improved substantially”. In the meeting, which was delayed due to the Government shutdown, it was…