Battle of The Bankers

Yesterday we saw the markets moves off the back of speeches from the current ECB president Mario Draghi and the outgoing governor of the Bank of England Mervyn King. First up was Super Mario, who in a parliamentary address, stated regarding the ECB’s monetary policy “Our policy stance has been, is, and will stay accommodative for the foreseeable future”. This gave investors confidence in the single currency and proceeded to buy giving the euro a significant boost against the pound and the US dollar in early trade. We did however, see a correction to this mid morning, proving the euro is still fragile and the tight range we have been trading in over recent weeks is going to need something very significant to break out of either way.

Sterling, with a lack of any major data, struggled across the board. Mervyn Kings comments that interest rates would be staying low for the foreseeable and swipes at the banking industry as a whole in his final address weighed on sterling for a second day. Better than expected GDP across the pond also helped the greenback to make further gains against sterling, back to the levels we saw end of last week.

Today is a bit more data heavy with the final reading for UK Q1 GDP due out at 9.30am. Any change to the previous readings is likely to bring some movement dependant on the outcome, with upward revision positive and downward being negative. We also have credit account and business investment data. For the single currency, there’s various confidence data releases, for services, consumer and industrial sectors along with money supply figures (mortgage lending). Stateside, we have inflation figures and house sale stats to digest this afternoon and overnight a flurry of Japanese figures.

For those with a transfer to make its worth keeping in touch with us here at Currency Index today as this morning could prove volatile. If you don’t want to take the risk of adverse movement, call one of our dedicated dealers this morning before the data starts to flow at 9.30am

to discuss your sending money aboard