On Thursday the greenback slid against its rivals, as markets digested the Federal Reserve's minutes from its most recent meeting, which signaled that an interest-rate hike in unlikely in the midyear.
The ICE U.S. Dollar index, a measure of the dollar’s strength against a basket of six rival currencies, was down 0.1% to 95.4060.
The minutes, released Wednesday, showed that Federal Reserve policy makers, while still upbeat that the U.S. economic recovery will pick up this year, are unwilling to raise interest rates until economic data confirms it.
Fed officials also hinted that there will hardly be signals
before the central bank does decide to lift rates.
Jameel Ahmad, chief market analyst at FXTM, considers that this lack of clarity on policy makers’ current rate-hike expectations is one of the reasons the dollar was weakening Thursday.
“To be honest, what I think really softened the USD bulls momentum is that the release revealed very little indication at all regarding the timing of a rate increase, which suggests to me that there is a complete lack of direction internally within the [Federal Open Market Committee] over when to raise rates,” Ahmad said in a note to clients.
The U.S. Labor Department on Thursday
reported that weekly claims for unemployment benefits rose by 10,000 to a
seasonally adjusted 274,000, but remained near a 15-year low. The dollar, however, hardly reacted on the news.
The euro rose to $1.1116, from $1.1098 Wednesday.
The British currency climbed to $1.5661, from $1.5535.
The greenback weakened to 121.231 yen, from the 121.25 level.
Surveys of purchasing managers showed that the eurozone’s economy slowed
for the second straight month in May.
The European Central
Bank’s minutes from the latest meeting showed that policy makers acknowledged that its
program of asset purchases has helped boost growth, and that they intend
to see the central bank’s program of asset purchases through to its
conclusion in September 2016.
The euro rose above $1.1150 after the data, but has since reduced its gains.
