Aside from service sector PMI numbers, which came in a poorer than expected and caused losses for the pound early on in the day, the UK experienced a quiet day as the rest of the week has been up until now. Part of yesterday’s dip (at 0.5%) for GBP was also due to USD’s consolidation, although comments by Mario Draghi yesterday on the state of the euro did help the pound reclaim some of its losses. Ending the week the way it began, the pound will be subject to events in Europe and the US as there is no real data to take a bite into.
On the mainland, the aforementioned comments by Draghi at an ECB presser that interest rates would not be changing set a cat amongst the pigeons, knocking the single currency back a bit. He also noted increasing the share limit of asset purchases from 25% to 30%, effectively increasing the amount of bonds the ECB cannow buy.Added on top of this, Europe may also see quantitative easing in place until Sep’16. Growth forecasts for this year, 2016 and 2017 have also been lowered to 1.4%, down from 1.5%.Today from the Eurozone we’ve seen German monthly factory orders which came out lower than expected. This didn’t have much effect on EUR, although we may see some sway following the release of European retail data this afternoon.
USD continued to slow war of attrition against both the pound (0.5%) and euro (hitting a two week high),whilst we also saw a mixed bag of data released such as jobless claims (which came in lower than expected) and trade balance figures and non-manufacturing PMI (which came in positively). The calendar is busy for the US today with non-farm payrolls data being released as well as unemployment rate data.
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