One of the major scheduled releases of last week was the U.S. Non-Farm Payrolls data, which was released on Friday. The market consensus was for a job gain of 191,000 but the actual number was only 157,000 which was a considerable undershoot. However, the other components of the release met expectations exactly, with a 0.3% increase in Average Hourly Earnings, and a steady (yet historically very low) unemployment rate of 3.9%. The Dollar reacted by falling a little, in fact only by 0.16%, before recovering to close the week not far off where it stood at the time of the data release. The fall was most pronounced against the Japanese Yen, and weakest against the Euro, demonstrating how these currently feel like the strongest and weakest major currencies respectively.
The other major topic in the Forex market is the ongoing trade war between the U.S.A. and China. Last Friday, China unveiled new tariffs on over five thousand different goods goods imported from the United States, with the extra levies ranging from five to 25 percent on a total value of goods less than half of that proposed by President Trump’s administration. A few hours ago, President Trump made a series of confident tweets in which he stated that the tariffs his administration has already imposed upon certain categories of imported Chinese goods are hurting China, implying they will shortly spur the Chinese to be more accommodating on the issue. He also stated that the Chinese are spending “a fortune” opposing tariffs on “ads and PR” to stymie his strategy politically. These will be interpreted as fighting words, although on a relatively modest scale, but they still have the potential to hit the U.S. Dollar and boost safe-havens such as the Japanese Yen when the markets open for the week in Asia later today.