The Pound
Sterling against the US dollar, otherwise known as Cable, had a topsy-turvy
session yesterday, starting with the announcement by the Bank of England that
it was not going to increase interest rates, and that all the members of the
Monetary Policy Committee that had supported this decision previously did so on
this occasion as well.
The Governor
of the BoE, Mark Carney, was at pains to emphasise that the UK authorities
would not be influenced by decisions made in the US about rate rises there. “We
will take our responsibilities”, he said. “We will determine the timing for the
start of the process of monetary policy normalisation.
While Cable
initially dropped as a result of these remarks, it steadied and then rallied at
the start of the US session (see above). By the time of the FOMC minutes
release, it had regained its value from the morning in time to give the usual
wobble on the actual release.
US Fed in Catch-22 situation
For its
part, the Federal Reserve minutes revealed that the decision at its meeting three
weeks previously, on September 17th , not to raise rates, was nothing like the close
call that the published remarks of various FOMC members would have indicated
prior to the meeting. From the minutes, the members of the committee seem now
to be talking the view that low inflation, which they do not like, is exacerbated
by a strong dollar. Expectations in the Forex market that interest rate rises
are imminent only serve to reinforce the strength of said dollar. Therefore,
they seem to be saying, we had better diffuse those expectations.
These
minutes, coupled with the much worse than expected Non-Farm Payrolls report a
week ago today, have done just that.
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