LONDON: The euro fell broadly on Monday on investor concern that Greek coalition parties had yet to sign off on the terms of a new bailout with a deadline imminent, keeping alive the risk of a messy default which could rock the currency bloc. Greece's coalition members must tell the European Union by noon on Monday (1000 GMT) whether they accept the painful terms of a new bailout worth 130 billion euros, with euro zone ministers postponing a meeting planned for Monday due to the delay in Athens. So far there appears some distance between the Greeks and the targets proposed by the IMF-EU-ECB troika with concerns mounting that Athens might be opposed to more austerity measures like labour reforms and wage cuts. "Investors are a bit cautious about the euro ahead of the deadline with a lot depending on it," said Chris Walker, currency strategist at UBS. "Real money investors are still structurally short of the euro and if cash is not made available to Greece, it will not be good news." The single currency fell 0.6 percent to stand at $1.3070 , having fallen to as low as $1.3052 on trading platform EBS. Near term support lies at $1.3023 - its Feb. 1 trough- with investors like macro funds looking to sell the single currency above $1.3100. Speculators have trimmed their record bearish bets against the euro with data from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission showing that positioning against the common currency had declined in the latest week to Jan. 31. Against the yen, the euro fell 0.4 percent to 100.16 yen while against the safe-haven Swiss franc, the common currency was slightly lower at 1.2065 francs. The Swiss central bank caps the strength of the franc at 1.20 per euro. Verses growth-linked Australian and New Zealand currencies, the euro hovered just above record lows set on Friday. Still, the euro's pullback is shallow with many market players believing that Athens and the "troika" of lenders will clinch a last minute deal. That could give the euro a near term boost, although most investors could use the bounce to sell and initiate fresh bearish positions, traders said. U.S. OVERSHADOWED Worries about Greece overshadowed Friday's confidence-boosting U.S. jobs data, which showed the world's biggest economy created jobs at the fastest pace in nine months in January. That took the unemployment rate to a three-year low of 8.3 percent. The U.S. employment report sent Treasury yields sharply higher and lifted the dollar against the yen. The dollar bought 76.70 yen, having rallied to 76.809 yen at one point, its highest in over a week. But Junya Tanase, currency strategist at JPMorgan Chase in Tokyo, said the dollar would remain under pressure against the Japanese yen despite its initial reaction to the U.S. job data. "When you look at the historical correlation between the jobs data and the dollar/yen, you can see that positive surprises in the data tend to lead to a rise in the dollar/yen on the day of announcement," he said. However, that correlation fizzles out within a week and as such data surprises have very little impact on the dollar/yen pair after that, Tanase said. Against a basket of major currencies, the dollar was up 0.5 percent at 79.295, off a two-month trough of 78.623 plumbed on Feb 1. The Australian dollar slipped from a six-month high hit on Friday after surprisingly soft Australian retail sales data kept alive expectations of a rate cut by the Australian central bank on Tuesday. The Aussie fell 0.5 percent to $1.0720, slipping from a six-month high of $1.0794 marked on Friday.

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