FOMC Provides No Surprises, EUR/USD Trims Losses

EUR/USD was heading down today but has reversed its movement recently and trimmed most of its losses as of now. FOMC released the minutes of its latest policy meeting, providing no surprises as policy makers were satisfied with the current monetary policy and the pace of asset-purchases reductions. This week is rather poor on fundamental data from the United States, providing no help for EUR/USD in determining direction of movement. The currency pair was trading mostly sideways for the past seven trading sessions but with a downside bias.
Crude oil inventories decreased by 7.2 million barrels last week, much more than the forecast 0.1 million, and are near the upper limit of the average range for this time of year. Stockpiles grew by 0.9 million in the previous week. Total motor gasoline inventories increased by 1.0 million barrels and are in the middle of the average range. (Event A on the chart.)
FOMC released the minutes of its April policy meeting today. (Event B on the chart.) On one hand, the members of the Committee were discussing “approaches to raising short-term interest rates when it becomes appropriate to do so”. On the other, the minutes explained that this “did not imply that normalization would necessarily begin sometime soon”. All in all, it looks like US policy makers are completely content wit the current monetary policy as the minutes said:

Members again judged that, if the economy continued to develop as anticipated, the Committee would likely reduce the pace of asset purchases in further measured steps at future meetings.

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