Forex Today: Dollar down as US employment data cooled tapering hopes

Valeria Bednarik FXStreet

What you need to know on Thursday, September 2:

The greenback came under strong selling pressure on the back of poor US employment-related data. The country published the ADP survey, which showed that the private sector added just 374K new jobs in August, much worse than the 613K expected, while the July figure was downwardly revised from 330K to 326K. The ISM Manufacturing PMI came in better than expected at 59.9, although the employment sub-component contracted to 49 from 52.9. Both figures hint at a weak Nonfarm Payroll report later this week, which in turn will justify US Federal Reserve Head Jerome Powell’s dovish stance on tapering.

EUR/USD trades near a daily high at 1.1856, while GBP/USD met sellers at around 1.3800. The AUD/USD reached 0.7384, holding on to intraday gains, while the Canadian dollar was affected by plummeting oil prices.

The black gold plummeted after comments from oil minister Alexander Novak, saying that Russian oil companies are ready to increase production beyond the rates and volumes set by OPEC+. WTI ended the day at $68.20 a barrel.

Spot gold has offered little to traders this week, currently trading at around $1,812 a troy ounce, unchanged on a daily basis. The bright metal is meeting sellers around the 38.2% retracement of the April/June rally at $1,825.10, the level to break to become more attractive to bulls.

US employment-related data will remain in the eye of the storm, ahead of the Nonfarm Payroll report to be out on Friday.

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Author

Valeria Bednarik

FXStreet

Valeria Bednarik was born and lives in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Her passion for math and numbers pushed her into studying economics in her younger years.

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