The euro fell against the US dollar for the fourth week in a row, posting the longest losing streak in 18 months. The currency also fell against the Japanese yen, declining for the third week. But the UK pound managed to perform even worse than the shared European currency, therefore the euro was up versus the UK currency this week after three weeks of losses.
The issues of Europe remained the same. The borrowing costs of the European nations continued to surge. The credit ratings continued to be downgraded. And there is the speculation that the European sovereign debt crisis is spreading and now not only the peripheral economies are in danger.
There wasn’t anything particularly new this week, in fact, and that was bad. It’s said “no news is good news”, but it’s not true in the case of the European problems. The situation is already quite bad and markets need news, good news specifically. There were some good news, in truth, like the improving German business climate, but that wasn’t nearly enough to change the outlook for the future of Europe.
EUR/USD and EUR/JPY were sliding for the whole week. EUR/GBP was a bit more interesting: the Monday’s surge was so big that the currency pair ended this week with a gain, even though it was falling steadily for the rest of the week.
EUR/USD was down from 1.3511 to 1.3234 and EUR/JPY fell from 103.82 to 102.88 this week. EUR/GBP opened at 0.8549, surged to 0.8664 and ended the week at 0.8573.
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