Dollar Up on Back of Great Expectations for Powell Speech

By Gina Lee

Investing.com – The dollar was up on Wednesday morning in Asia, with investors anticipating a speech by U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell later in the day.

The U.S. Dollar Index that tracks the greenback against a basket of other currencies slipped 0.04% to 99.998 by 11:40 AM ET (4:40 AM GMT).

Powell is likely to resist calls for negative rates, a hot issue since U.S. money market instruments started pricing in a chance of negative rates last week.

But dropping U.S. consumer prices dropping 0.8% in April raised the possibility of deflation as the economy sinks deeper into recession, fueling the debate about policy responses and putting pressure on the Fed to do more.

U.S. President Donald Trump again pushed the Federal Reserve to adopt negative interest rates on Tuesday.

“I would advise against negative rates. Japan has done that but the perception here is that it wasn’t so good,” Hiroyuki Ueno, senior strategist at Sumitomo Mitsui (NYSE:SMFG) Trust Asset Management, told Bloomberg.

“But what’s worrying is that Trump is now talking about them. Looking at past examples, the Fed has eventually done what Trump wanted quite often.”

The USD/JPY pair was up 0.07% to 107.21.

The AUD/USD pair revered its losses from Tuesday, gaining 0.08% to 0.6474 in the aftermath of a newspaper report that China banned some Australian meat imports. The AUD trimmed its losses as Australia’s trade minister played down the issue as a technicality.

Meanwhile, the NZD/USD pair slid 1% to 0.6015.

The USD/CNY pair gained 0.13% to 7.0906 and the GBP/USD pair gained 0.09% to 1.2271.

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