The dollar climbed Friday on measures taken by China to ease this week's market turmoil and a hefty rise in US jobs in December, but gains were limited by worries over whether Beijing has done enough to calm its battered stock market. This week's steep losses across global stock markets due to fears about further slowing in the world's second-biggest economy have clouded investors' outlook on the greenback and whether the Federal Reserve has room to raise US interest rates further, if at all, in 2016, analysts said.
"The market's reaction is something between curious and concerning," Richard Scalone, co-head of foreign exchange at TJM Brokerage in Chicago said of the December US payrolls report. The dollar's rebound from a drop Thursday picked up after data that showed US employers added 292,000 workers in December, well exceeding the 200,000 forecast of economists polled by Reuters.
Those gains then faded as traders focused on the absence of wage growth last month, which analysts reckoned caused US inflation to struggle to rise to 2 percent, the Fed's goal. The dollar index, which measures the greenback against a basket of six currencies, was up 0.3 percent at 98.546 which was far below its session high of 99.183. It posted its biggest one-day decline in about a month on Thursday. The euro was down 0.3 percent against the dollar at $1.0895, while the greenback clung to a 0.2 percent gain at 117.87 yen, pulling away from a 4-1/2-month low of 117.33 on Thursday, according to EBS data.
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