Market Drivers – European Session 04-11-2021

The markets saw some moves during the European session on Thursday. The main drivers of the markets were the British interest rate decision.

The dollar rose again as the market continued after the FOMC meeting, with the dollar significantly outperforming all currencies except the yen.

The Bank of England’s (BoE) Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) decided to leave the benchmark interest rate unchanged at 0.1% following the November policy meeting. in line with the market consensus, market pricing was pointing out to a 50% chance of a 15 basis points rate hike.

There were 269,000 initial claims for unemployment benefits in the US during the week ending October 30, the data published by the US Department of Labor (DOL) revealed on Thursday. This reading followed the previous print of 283,000 (revised from 291,000) and came in better than the market expectation of 277,000.

The dollar traded higher on Thursday, recovering from the previous session’s losses after the Federal Reserve said it was in no hurry to raise interest rates after it began scaling back its bond-buying program.

The dollar index, which measures the greenback against a basket of six other currencies, was up 0.2% at 94.088, up after Wednesday’s drop of nearly 0.3%.

EURUSD fell 0.3% to 1.1577, giving up Wednesday’s gains, while USDJPY rose 0.2% to 114.25, not far from a multi-year high of 114.69 hit last month.

Unit Labor Costs in the US rose at an annual rate of 8.3% in the third quarter. This reading surpassed the market expectation of 5.2% by a wide margin and followed the second quarter’s increase of 1.3%.