NEW YORK: The dollar rose across the board on Thursday, supported by strong US labor market data and as investors awaited Fed Chair Jerome Powell’s speech on Friday at the Jackson Hole Economic Policy Symposium.
Investors are looking forward to Chair Powell’s address on monetary policy at 10:05 am ET on Friday for clues to the Fed’s thinking on whether it is about done with interest rate hikes and how long it plans to hold rates high. “I think what we are seeing is largely pre-Jackson Hole position readjustments,” Stuart Cole, chief macro economist at Equiti Capital in London said.
“Nobody knows what Powell is going to say tomorrow and therefore the default currency to move into is the USD,” Cole said.
The dollar was also helped by data that showed the number of Americans filing new claims for unemployment benefits fell last week, as labor market conditions remained tight despite the Fed’s aggressive interest rate hikes.
“I think possibly the jobless claims numbers have also provided some support for the dollar as they were not as soft as had been feared and go some way to offsetting the downwards revision to the payrolls number we had yesterday,” Cole said.
China’s yuan, which has been supported by state-bank buying in recent sessions, steadied at 7.2839 per dollar.
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