Thursday 14 January 2016

GBP/USD back over $1.44.....but for how long?

Good afternoon,

Well, it wasn't all doom and gloom for the pound today, the release of the Bank of England minutes and rate decision actually helped the pound......only slightly though.

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For the sixth straight month the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) voted 8-1 in favour of keeping interest rates on hold. However it was the one vote from Ian McCafferty that helped push the pound back over $1.44 today.

As I have mentioned a couple of times the issues in China and poor UK economic have been weighing heavily on the pound in recent weeks. As a result there was a chance Mr McCafferty would change his stance and vote for rates to remain at the current level.

Fortunately for the pound and all GBP crosses that didn't happen and as the vote and minutes were released GBP/USD climbed from $1.4366 to $1.4444.


But let's not carried away, today's events are not going to push GBP/USD back towards the $1.50 mark. There is still more scope for the pounds value to drop even further and if the Federal Reserve look at raising rates again in the coming months the dollar could easily strengthen.

The UK economy is not out of the woods yet and the UK's inflation is figure is still miles away from the Bank of England's target of 2%.

Today's meeting minutes showed the central bank believe it will take longer than originally thought for the inflation figure to reach the required level and indicated that inflation was likely sit around 0.5% for a number of months this year.

Based this information I think we can safely say we won't see any action from the Bank of England this year, with many analysts predicting a rate hike will now come in the early part of 2017.

As we all know it is impossible to predict which way the markets will move but have seen in the last month how quickly things can change.

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