The Australian gained against most of its major rivals today, with the exception of the euro. News from Australia itself was not particularly supportive, but the currency profited from the positive market sentiment caused by the news from Great Britain.
The National Australia Bank pushed back its projections for an interest rate hike from the Reserve Bank of Australia. Previously, the NAB was predicting that the RBA will perform couple of hikes in 2019. But now, it is not expected that the central bank will hike rates before 2020 as Alan Oster, Chief Economist at the NAB, stated:
We have delayed our expectation for the first RBA increase in the cash rate to the second half of 2020.
The Westpac Melbourne Institute Index of Consumer Sentiment rose 0.1% in December from November. That was a noticeably slower rate of growth than 2.8% registered in the previous month.
AUD/USD rose from 0.7205 to 0.7217 as of 19:05 GMT today, touching the high of 0.7238 intraday. AUD/JPY traded at 81.72 after opening at 81.68 and touching the daily high of 82.06. At the same time, EUR/AUD gained from 1.5702 to 1.5741.
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