A public holiday today Stateside provides welcome relieft for the Greenback. The USD has been confirmed as the worst performing G10 currency in the first 6 months of the year according to Rabobank and is threatening to continue its poor performance into the back end of 2017.
Prima facie, one may place the blame on the Dollar decline solely with President Trump however looking at the hard data the economy simply hasn’t picked up as much as intially expected.
Central to this is the now increased market scepticism as to weather the Fed willl be able to announce a third rate hike by the end of the year.
Reversal out of long USD positions is also a function of an improvement in European fundamentals [i.e. political risk] which have driven money back accross the Atlantic. This has seen EUR trade to its highest since May 2016 against the Dollar and is predicted to end the year at 1.1700.
What is the Mar-a-Lago Accord, and should markets care? At heart, the Mar-a-Lago Accord is a proposal for President Trump to weaken the US Dollar. As we know, Trump’s typical deregulatory and risk-inducing persuasion would, all other things equal, increase demand for the US Dollar. As far as the relationship between perceived risk and the […]
Blinkers on The Federal Reserve published its latest interest rate decision last night. As widely expected, it made no change to current benchmark rates. The Fed funds rate therefore remains within a restrictive 4.25-4.5% target band. The Fed did make some marginal changes to its balance sheet operations, tweaking some caps on treasury redemptions. But […]
Where’s the Trump Put? On Tuesday Trump went some way towards remediating for his comments that appeared to show a disregard for a recession over the weekend. In a Fox News interview on Sunday the President declined to rule out the prospect of a recession, contributing to the stock market decline come Monday. For what […]