JPY, USD Climbs Higher in Thin Trading
by Korman Tam
9/1/2008 1:45:00 PM
The dollar is higher across the board, strengthening past the 1.80-level against the sterling and pushing the euro to 1.4583. Despite the holiday-shortened week, with the US market closed today in observance of the Labor Day holiday, foreign exchange traders will digest a barrage of economic events including several key central bank monetary policy announcements, including the Bank of Canada, the Reserve Bank of Australia, the European Central Bank and the Bank of England. Among the central banks, only the RBA is expected to shift policy - cutting its benchmark interest rate by 25-basis points to 7.0%. However, commentary from the BoC and ECB will be closely scrutinized for clues on whether policy changes from either central bank can be anticipated.
US economic reports due out this week consist of manufacturing ISM, durable goods orders, factory orders, weekly jobless claims, Q2 productivity, services ISM, and the August jobs report. Manufacturing ISM, due out on Tuesday at 10:00 AM, is seen slipping beneath the key 50-level to 49.9, which indicates contraction in the manufacturing sector for the month of August. Meanwhile, garnering the lion's share of market attention this week will be Friday's August jobs data. Although the unemployment rate is estimated to remain unchanged at 5.7%, the data is likely to indicate a loss of 73k jobs, greater than the 51k jobs lost from July.
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