A U.S. employment report provided support for the EUR/USD currency pair to climb significantly erasing earlier losses as data came much below forecasts, declining attractiveness for the dollar which also posted losses versus several important currencies before the end of this week’s session. EUR/USD is currently trading at 1.4415 and is likely to end the first week of 2010 with a result in favor of the European single currency.
Non-farm payrolls posted a drop of 85k in December, a much worse reading than the revised value of 4k in November. Forecasts were frustrated with this report as they expected an optimistic decline of just 3k. Unemployment rate remained unchanged at 10.0% while forecasts expected a slight advance to 10.1%.
Wholesale inventories increased by 1.5% in November from a previous revised advance of 0.6% in October. Data came more negative than estimates that expected the total value of goods held in inventory by wholesalers to decrease 0.2%.
Consumer credit was the last USD report this week and brought extremely negative figures as it decreased $ 17.5 billion in November, from a previous decline of $ 3.5 billion in October, and much below forecasts that expected a downsize of $ 4.9 billion.
Initial jobless claims published yesterday declined to 434k in the past week from a revised value of 433k two weeks ago. Forecasts were less optimistic suggesting the number of applications filed at 449k.
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