A dreadful week saw the US Dollar (USD) navigate choppy waters, going from the area of three-week tops to multi-day lows in hours and eventually leaving the scales tilted toward the negative side. Who to blame? The bond market? The MoF-BoJ duo? Unabated geopolitical tensions? The Fed?
Canada lost nearly 42K jobs in August against forecasts for a 15K gain, and the unemployment rate stayed at 6.4% anyway. Wages grew 2% on the year, the slowest since November 2017 outside the pandemic years.
The EUR/USD pair posted a modest comeback after falling in the last week of August, finishing the week just above the 1.1600 level.
After declining sharply in the first half of the week, Gold (XAU/USD) managed to erase its losses, reflecting the changes in the market pricing of the Federal Reserve’s (Fed) possible interest rate decision at the next meeting.
The Japanese Yen (JPY) experienced a sudden burst higher after falling back below the 160.00 psychological mark against the US Dollar (USD) earlier this week amid a more hawkish repricing of Bank of Japan (BoJ) rate hike expectations.
Gold clings to its previous day’s gains on Friday ahead of the United States (US) Nonfarm Payrolls (NFP) data for August, which will be published at 12:30 GMT.