The US dollar today rallied briefly against a basket of its peers as tracked by the US Dollar Index, after the release of strong US inflation data. The greenback’s rally was negatively affected by the weak retail sales data for December released early in the American session.
The US Dollar Index, which measures the greenback’s strength against its peers, hit a high of 90.12 shortly after the release of US inflation report, but later retraced some of its gains.
The greenback rallied higher after the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the Consumer Price Index for January, which beat expectations. The overall CPI came in at 0.5% in January, while the core CPI was recorded at 0.3%, both prints were higher than expected. The CPI was recorded at an annualized rate of 2.1%, while the core CPI came in at an annualized 1.8%, both prints again exceeded expectations, which fueled the greenback’s ascent. The release of the advance retail sales data for January by the Census Bureau hindered the greenback from rallying higher. The advance retail sales contracted by 0.3%, which was lower than the 0.2% expected expansion.
The core advance retail sales also contracted by 0.2% versus the expected 0.3% growth. The real average hourly earnings increased 0.8% in January 2017 as compared to January 2017, while the average weekly earnings decreased by 0.8% as compared to the previous 0.6% print.
The greenback’s future performance is likely to be affected by tomorrow’s industrial production, initial jobless claims and producer price index reports.
The GBP/USD currency pair was trading at 1.3910 as at 15:22 GMT having rallied from a low of 1.3801 after the US data. The USD/JPY currency pair was trading at 107.16 having dropped from an intra-day high of 107.55 as the DXY traded lower.
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