BS: Dollar Erases Drop After Jobless Claims Decline; Krona Slides
The dollar erased a decline against a basket of peers after the fewest number of Americans since before the last recession filed applications for unemployment benefits last week.
The yen strengthened, rising to a three-week high against the dollar, after an unexpected decline in Chinese exports revived demand for safer assets. The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index fell to a five-month low yesterday after Federal Reserve minutes damped bets U.S. policy makers are moving toward raising interest rates. Sweden’s krona slumped after a government report showed consumer prices dropped twice as much as economists predicted.
“The dollar softened on the back of the minutes of the March FOMC, which push back against the perception that the Fed could be ready to hike rates as soon as the middle of next year,” Jane Foley, a senior foreign-exchange strategist at Rabobank International in London, wrote today in a client note. Still “the more advanced business cycles in both the U.K. and the U.S. suggest” that the dollar and the pound “are likely to win back a modest amount of ground,” she wrote.
VIDEO: Jobless Claims Rose More Than Forecast Last Week
The Bloomberg Dollar Spot Index, which tracks the greenback against 10 major counterparts, gained less than 0.1 percent to 1,005.98 as of 8:38 a.m. in New York. It earlier slid to 1,004.08, the lowest level since Oct. 30.
Jobless claims decreased by 32,000 to 300,000 in the week ended April 5, the lowest since May 2007, a Labor Department report showed today in Washington. The figure was lower than the most optimistic forecast in a Bloomberg survey of 52 economists. The median estimate called for 320,000 claims.
To contact the reporters on this story: John Detrixhe in New York at jdetrixhe1@bloomberg.net; Lukanyo Mnyanda in Edinburgh at lmnyanda@bloomberg.net