The US dollar received a significant hit to its strength today after the release of non-farm payrolls. While dollar bulls were very optimistic ahead of the NFP report, their optimism evaporated after the actual reading turned out to be almost two times weaker than forecasts.
US employers added just 126,000 jobs in March while market participants were counting on growth by at least 246,000. Moreover, the previous months increase received a negative revision from 295,000 to 264,000. On a positive note, the unemployment rate was stable at 5.5 percent, and wage inflation was at 0.3 percent, a bit higher than expected.
Ahead of the report, analysts have been mostly bullish on the dollar. Yet not it is far harder to be optimistic about the currency, especially after the Federal Reserve signaled that the timing for an interest rate increase will be very data depending, and the data was not good at all.
EUR/USD rallied from 1.0878 to 1.0966 as of 20:18 GMT today, reaching the high of 1.1026 intraday. GBP/USD advanced from 1.4831 to 1.4916. USD/JPY dropped from 119.71 to 118.97.
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