© Reuters
By Peter Nurse
Investing.com – The dollar gains ground this Friday ahead of the release of the monthly US jobs report, which could help the Federal Reserve decide on a more aggressive cycle of monetary policy tightening.
At 9:00 AM ET, the , which tracks the currency against a basket of six other major currencies, is up 0.1% at 98.465.
The long-awaited US employment report for March will be released at 2:30 p.m. ET and is expected to show continued signs of improvement in the labor market, with some 500,000 new jobs created.
The omens for a positive figure are good, after data on Wednesday indicated that US companies created 455,000 more jobs in March, and weekly data remained at very low levels on Thursday.
The US Federal Reserve raised interest rates by 25 basis points in March, for the first time since 2018, and several central bank policymakers have since indicated that a larger 50-point hike may be needed. basics in May to combat rising inflation.
“We remain doubtful that the dollar will go much lower from these levels, and markets could rebuild more long positions in the greenback ahead of the NFP report. [del viernes]which could well endorse the Federal Reserve’s recently adopted aggressive stance on tightening expectations,” analysts at ING (AS:) say in a note.
The pair rose 0.7% to the 122.44 level, the pair’s first gain in four days, as traders refocus on the gap between bond yields, as the Bank of Japan Governor Haruhiko Kuroda has made it clear this week that he is determined to stick to his 0.25% target for the 10-year bond yield while the US Federal Reserve raises interest rates.
Elsewhere, the pair is trading 0.1% higher to the 1.1071 level, stabilizing after retreating off 1-month highs at 1.1185, as optimism around a ceasefire in Ukraine, even with new negotiations due to start later on Friday.
Fears of an energy crisis in Europe are rising after Russian President Vladimir Putin on Friday set a deadline for European buyers of Russian gas to pay in rubles, which they are unwilling to do. Moscow supplies about a third of all Europe’s gas.
The pair was down 0.1% to 1.3115, also on concerns over Russian gas supplies, but supported by the Bank of England, which has repeatedly raised interest rates to deal with rising consumer inflation.
The pair is down 0.1% to the 0.7475 level, while the pair is up 0.2% to 6.3553 after the fell to 48.1 points in March, the largest rate of contraction since February 2020, compared to 50.4 the previous month.
Morgan Stanley on Friday sharply lowered China’s full-year 2022 economic growth forecast to 4.6% from 5.1%, citing the country’s strict measures to combat COVID infections.
