The British pound today weakened against the US dollar during the early North American session as the greenback opened strongly against most of its peers. The British pound was on a downward trend during the late Asian session and early European session, before retracing some of its loses during the mid-European session.
The British pound lost about 50 points against the US dollar at the height of its decline against the US dollar, but had retraced some of its losses at the time of writing.
The British pound opened today’s session weaker after a week of disappointing macro data from the UK docket. Most of the data released last week such as the Markit/CIPS UK Services PMI did not meet expectations. The raft of data released by the Office for National Statistics on Friday including the UK construction output and the UK trade balance data also fell short of expectations. The disappointing data continued to affect the pound negatively given today’s empty UK docket.
The US dollar opened the week’s trading on an uptrend as evidenced by the US Dollar Index, which has been trading above its opening price of 96.02 for most of today’s session. The release of the disappointing US Labor Market Conditions Index, which came in at 1.5 versus the expected 2.5, had minimal impact on the currency pair.
Tomorrow’s speeches from the Bank of England‘s Andy Haldane and the Federal Reserve‘s Williams are likely to influence the currency pair’s future performance.
The GBP/USD currency pair was trading at 1.2875 at 16:43 GMT having declined from a high of 1.2908. The GBP/JPY was trading at 146.97 having declined from a high of 147.46 earlier today.
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