The Euro continues its march upwards as it posted fresh eleven-month highs against the US Dollar and a new twelve-month high against the British Pound. The single currency is also heading for a seventh week of gains against the Japanese Yen.
The rises come after a morning of mixed data emerging from its currency rivals host nations. The Yen continues to weaken as the Bank of Japan comes under increasing pressure to increase its monetary easing programme and continues its planned devaluation.
The Dollar weakened due to a weakening in the demand for safe haven currencies after the latest German business confidence showed that business leaders in Europe’s biggest economy are confident that the nation will make a strong recovery. The index has now improved for a third straight month.
Against the Pound the single currency has hit a new yearly high after advancing by 0.7% in the space of Friday morning. The Pounds weakening comes after the British Office for National Statistics released the struggling nation’s latest GDP figures. According to them the UK economy shrank by 0.3% in the last quarter of 2012 leading to increasing concern that the nation could be close to sliding into an unprecedented triple-dip recession.
Manufacturing fell by 1.5% in the fourth quarter, the services sector was flat, but construction output rose by 0.3%.Within the manufacturing sector, mining and quarrying output fell by 10.2%, the biggest decline since records began in 1997, driven by disruption to North Sea oil and gas fields. According to the ONS if gas and oil extraction was removed from the figures then the decline would have only been 0.1%.
Jonathan Portes, an economist from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, said there was a “co-ordinated policy failure across Europe”.
“Underlying it, ignoring all the special factors, what we see is the economy is not delivering the sustainable growth that we would normally see at this point in the cycle,” he told the BBC. ‘This is due to the [UK] government’s policies and the failure of governments in the Eurozone. They should not have cut the deficit so quickly and before the recovery was sustained.”
The Euro is expected to make further gains during the course of the day.
As of 10:25 am
The Euro to US Dollar exchange rate is currently trading at 1.3444
The Euro to Pound Sterling exchange rate is currently trading at 0.8525
The Euro to Australian Dollar exchange rate is currently trading at 1.2859
The Euro to New Zealand Dollar exchange rate is currently trading at 1.6030
The Euro to Canadian Dollar exchange rate is currently trading at 1.3488
The US Dollar to Euro exchange rate is currently trading at 0.7437
The Pound Sterling to Euro exchange rate is currently trading at 1.1879
The Australian Dollar to Euro exchange rate is currently trading at 0.7774
The New Zealand Dollar to Euro exchange rate is currently trading at 0.6237
The Canadian Dollar to Euro exchange rate is currently trading at 0.7414
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