The US dollar has lost some of its attractiveness which it got immediately after the Federal Reserve decision. The Wall Street has taken a leaf out of the greenback’s book as well and it’s started the day lower. As for now, one could conclude that the FED’s impact has been short-lived so far but the jury is still out though.
On the FX front, we got the monetary policy decision from Norway which buoyed the NOK. The Norwegian krone is undoubtedly the best one in the whole G10 basket and gains as much as 0.7% against the US dollar. What was the reason for that a move? The higher path of projected interest rate hikes – as simple as that. Nevertheless, there is nothing to change the Norges Bank’s view any time soon and convince it to hike rates before long.
The FED plays by far the major role when it comes to pushing the Australian dollar down, however there is no the sole reason why the AUD is so weak today. The AUDUSD is already down 1.2% and it’s decisively the largest move across the broad FX market. Beside the Federal Reserve, which contributed to a fresh sell-off of the AUD yesterday, S&P added fuel to the fire as well as it chose to slash the Chinese credit rating for the first time since 1999, citing mainly the risks from surging debt.
The data-wise was rather benign today when it comes to the US economy, however we got two better than expected readings. First and foremost, US jobless claims unexpectedly declined last week by 23k to 259k while the consensus pointed to 302k as the adverse effect related to the hurricane Harvey continued to fade away. The second release came from Philadelphia when the regional PMI index easily beat the forecast put at 17.1 and came in at 23.8.
The FED’s decision rattled the financial markets across the board as the US dollar got a boost, the US Treasuries along with gold prices lost their appeal and the stock markets across the pond were barely changed. On the flip side, there has been no a noteworthy move across the cryptocurrency space so far except Dash (DSHUSD). However, before we move on to a technical analysis, let’s whip through the most interesting stories related to the industry.