FX Daily: Riksbank's Hike and Dollar Strength Amid Inflation Concerns

FX Daily: Riksbank needs to show the krona some love

The central message coming from this week's Sintra conference is that economies are holding up better than expected, the decline in inflation has been frustratingly slow and more tightening needs to be done. Expect the dollar to stay bid ahead of what should be another high US core inflation print tomorrow. Elsewhere, the Riksbank is expected to hike 25bp.

 

USD: No reason to fight dollar strength this week

Central bank communication at this week's Sintra conference in Portugal has stayed pretty hawkish. The core message seems to be that low unemployment rates have allowed economies to withstand large tightening cycles reasonably well, meaning that inflation has not fallen as much as expected. Expectations for the duration and terminal rates for tightening cycles are being revised higher. This is most credibly being done in the US, where the economy appears to be outperforming.

This is allowing the dollar to stay quite bid - especially against those currencies without much/any interest rate difference such as the Japanese yen and the Chinese renminbi. On the latter, policymakers are gently trying to fight the steady move higher in USD/CNY by setting lower fixings. However, they may be forced to cut the required reserve on FX deposits as they did last September if they want to send a stronger message of displeasure over renminbi depreciation. And as we have seen over the years, a steady uptrend in USD/CNY is not conducive to an overall bear trend in the dollar.

Back to the Fed. If central banks are increasingly data-dependent, what's next in store for the Fed? The most important data point of the week will be tomorrow's release of the core PCE deflator for May expected at 0.3/0.4% month-on-month. Presumably, investors will be a little long dollars going into that release. Before that, however, we today see the weekly initial jobless claims figures. These have recently settled at higher levels. Any big upside surprise here could knock the dollar intra-day on the view that tighter policy is finally easing up labour supply - a key shoe to drop in the fight against inflation. 

DXY looks biased to 103.30/35 and possibly 103.65 - as long as initial claims do not spike higher today.