Today's Currency Movers

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EURUSD, Daily
EURUSD has remained under pressure since trading sideways at support for yesterday afternoon. ECB pledges of accelerated or expanded QE this week have contributed to the correction we’ve seen this week from Friday’s three-month high at 1.1466. There also remains a lack of substantive progress between the Greek government and creditors in bailout negotiations, despite all too familiar optimistic sound-bites from various officials. The ECB considers widening of eligible Greek assets, but also raising the haircut on Greek collateral according to Greek newspaper Kathimerinini. This would maintain the lifeline for Greek banks, as the net effect should be broadly neutral. Time for a deal is running out, but if Tsipras hopes he can circumvent the Eurogroup and strike a deal at the margins of the upcoming summit in Riga, he is likely be mistaken. Creditors continue to insist on the agreed conditions, even though it is clear that they want to keep Greece in the Eurozone, as the impact of the first member exiting the Eurozone is uncertain.

After trading a bit too long sideways at support yesterday the lack of upside momentum turned into a downside move this morning. EURUSD has fallen below the supporting rising trendline and to a 38.2% Fibonacci level that also coincides with a daily pivot low from May 5th. Today’s low at the time of writing has been 1.1060, only 8 pips above the March 26th high and now the latest complete 4h candle is a hammer. Therefore it seems that market is placing some significance to the March 26th high as support. At the same time Stochastics are edging close to oversold levels. This suggests that the down move is getting overdone. However, at the same time the move below 1.1131 pivotal support created a resistance level that is relatively close to the current price. This combination of support and resistance levels could lead to price stalling at current levels before the direction is resolved. Nearest support and resistance levels are at 1.1052 and 1.1131. Additionally there is intraday resistance at 1.1158. If these are cleared the next significant daily resistance level is at 1.1324.
2015-05-20_1225

Currency Pairs, Grouped Performance (% Change)
This morning we’ve seen some USD and GBP strength coupled with EUR and AUD weakness but the moves have been relatively small. DXY has run into a resistance at levels that turned it lower in the beginning of May AUDUSD has been the weakest dollar pair while GBP has been able to resist the USD strength and is practically unchanged.

Main Macro Events Today

Japan Preliminary GDP accelerated to a 2.4% growth pace in Q1 (q/q, saar), much better than expected following a downwardly revised 1.1% pace in Q4 (was +1.5%). Consumption grew at a 1.5% pace in Q1 (q/q, saar) contrary to an expected slowing following the 1.5% rate in Q4.
Australian Westpac Consumer Sentiment survey improved to 6.4 per cent in May following an interest rate cut and budget. Improvement from previous number (-3.2%) tells of a significant brightening in the outlook consumers have on their near term financial future. A surprise tax break for small businesses contributed to the positive sentiment.
Norway Gross Domestic Product growth was weak. According to seasonally-adjusted figures, gross domestic product for Mainland Norway rose by 0.5 per cent in the 1st quarter of 2015, while the growth in the second half of 2014 has been revised downwards to a growth of 0.4 per cent. For the first time since the 2nd quarter of 2010, there was no growth in employment.
Bank of England Minutes to the may MPC meeting showed a unanimous vote to keep policy unchanged. The minutes showed that while there was some uncertainty about the different estimates of spare capacity within the economy, the best collective view was that it amounts to around 0.5% of GDP and that it is “likely to be fully absorbed within a year”. So while the quarterly inflation report last week and the unanimous vote on unchanged rate indicate that rates won’t go up soon the diminishing slack in the economy signals that inflation will likely go up in the medium term and in line with that “all members agreed that it was more likely than not that bank rate would rise over the three-year forecast period”.
BoE MPC Vote Hike: BoE minutes to the April MPC meeting showed unanimous votes to maintain the repo rate at 0.5% and the QE total was also unanimously maintained at GBP 375 billion. No change this time either as the MPC voted 9-0 to keep interest rates at 0.5 percent for now.
FOMC Minutes.