The Canadian dollar was performing extremely poor today. While the loonie has managed to erase intraday losses versus the US dollar by now, the Canadian currency remained below the opening level against other most-traded rivals. The most likely reason for the drop was the decline of crude oil prices. Positive Canadian employment data did little to help the currency.
Futures for crude oil fell about 2% on Thursday due to a range of negative factors. Crude oil is the biggest export commodity of Canada, therefore the Canadian currency often trades in tandem with crude.
Automatic Data Processing reported that Canadian employment grew by 30,400 jobs in June from May. That is after falling by 36,700 in the preceding month.
Yesterday, Statistic Canada reported that the Consumer Price Index fell 0.2% in June from May, without adjustments for seasonal variations. While it was a worse reading than an increase of 0.4% registered in May, it was better than a drop by 0.3% predicted by analysts. Year-over-year, the CPI rose by 2.0%, slowing from the 2.4% rate of growth logged in the previous month. Seasonally adjusted, the index fell 0.1% after rising 0.3% in May.
USD/CAD dropped from 1.3051 to 1.3029 as of 21:43 GMT today after rising to the daily high of 1.3095 earlier. EUR/CAD rallied from 1.4648 to 1.4690. CAD/JPY dropped from 82.68 to 82.33.
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