Week in FX Europe: EUR Limps into next Week

  • EUR’s stability well contained
  • Investors have confidence in the ECB
  • Fed to maintain dovish strategy

Restricted to a tight trading range against the U.S. dollar, the euro is holding steady against the greenback to end the week despite Thursday’s mini-capital markets meltdown thanks to Portugal’s highly publicized banking problems. The EUR’s stability suggests investors believe that Portuguese banking concerns are relatively self-contained.

Investors must be confident that eurozone policymakers have the necessary mechanisms in place to deal with any real blow out in bond yields for the currency bloc’s peripheries.

Regarding central bank interest rate yield differentials, the pace of the U.S. Federal Reserve’s rate-hike expectations have certainly been dialed back this week, especially after the Fed’s June minutes release last Wednesday.

For the European Central Bank (ECB), fears over the eurozone’s economic growth, coupled with Portugal’s financial concerns, will serve to soothe any euro rate-hike anxieties for the time being. The futures market is currently pricing in a +41% Fed hike for June 2015, down from +61% at the beginning of this week before the Federal Open Market Committee minutes were made public.

Next week, investors will be tuning into Fed Chair Janet Yellen’s semiannual testimony before Congress. No surprises are expected. The majority of the market will be expecting the Fed to maintain its dovish stance, again signaling that U.S. policy tightening will remain well beyond the end of the Fed’s tapering in October.

With no data to work with on Friday, the FX market will be looking to next week in a search for commitment that the general thawing of yesterday’s blast of risk aversion will have stamina.

A Look Ahead

From a European perspective, the economic calendar is light, certainly a sign that capital markets are heading toward the infamous summer doldrums. However on Monday — likely the highlight of the week — ECB chief Mario Draghi is due to testify on monetary policy before the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs at the European Parliament in Strasbourg. On Tuesday, German ZEW economic sentiment is released. It’s a level of a, “diffusion index-based on surveyed German institutional investors and analysts.” Anything negative or positive from Europe’s dominant economy could have a potential impact on the EUR.

WEEK AHEAD

* GBP Consumer Price Index
* USD Advance Retail Sales
* NZD Consumer Prices Index
* CNY GDP
* CAD Bank of Canada Rate Decision
* EUR Euro-Zone Consumer Price Index
* CAD Bank Canada Consumer Price Index
* CAD Consumer Price Index
* USD U. of Michigan Confidence

Content is for general information purposes only. It is not investment advice or a solution to buy or sell securities. Opinions are the authors; not necessarily that of OANDA Business Information & Services, Inc. or any of its affiliates, subsidiaries, officers or directors. If you would like to reproduce or redistribute any of the content found on MarketPulse, an award winning forex, commodities and global indices analysis and news site service produced by OANDA Business Information & Services, Inc., please access the RSS feed or contact us at info@marketpulse.com. Visit https://www.marketpulse.com/ to find out more about the beat of the global markets. © 2023 OANDA Business Information & Services Inc.

Dean Popplewell

Dean Popplewell

Vice-President of Market Analysis at MarketPulse
Dean Popplewell has nearly two decades of experience trading currencies and fixed income instruments. He has a deep understanding of market fundamentals and the impact of global events on capital markets. He is respected among professional traders for his skilled analysis and career history as global head of trading for firms such as Scotia Capital and BMO Nesbitt Burns. Since joining OANDA in 2006, Dean has played an instrumental role in driving awareness of the forex market as an emerging asset class for retail investors, as well as providing expert counsel to a number of internal teams on how to best serve clients and industry stakeholders.
Dean Popplewell