020 7898 0500The US dollar remained very static yesterday morning, up until comments made by US Federal Reserve member Fischer, who suggested that the central bank may want to wait until inflation levels return to normal before looking at increasing interest rates.
He also pointed out that global deflation is a factor that ‘bothers’ the Federal Reserve. Because of this comment, the US dollar weakened slightly in the afternoon. Following Fischer’s comments, Lockhart, also a member of the Federal Reserve, said the US has seen substantial progress in cutting unemployment – this, however, had very little impact on the dollar.
Not much data is due for release today, but we do have non-farm productivity data, which measures the labour efficiency when producing goods and services (excluding the farming sector). This is expected to increase following a previous negative figure. This follows the preliminary unit labour costs, which show the price businesses pay for labour (also excluding the farming sector); this is however expected to decrease. If the results for either or both deviate from expectations, we may see movement in US dollar markets.
