This week, traders brace for the July US FOMC’s monetary policy decision. The US Federal Reserve is expected to hike rates by 75 bps, lifting the Federal funds rate to 2.50%.

- Friday’s data revealed that the global economy is increasingly heading towards a dangerous slowdown, with central banks raising interest rates at high rates compared to a very loose monetary policy during the pandemic to support growth. U.S. economic growth is slowing and inflation is "way too high“.

- Recession fears should continue to prevent a solid recovery in risk sentiment, which should incidentally give some extra support to safe-havens (including USD) and may keep the path uneven for high-beta commodity currencies.

Equities:

- In Wall Street, US stocks retreated on Friday, snapping a three-day winning streak, as some surprisingly weak quarterly updates from companies spooked investors.

- The S&P 500 fell 37.32 points, or 0.93%, to 3961.63 a day after the broad benchmark index jumped 1%. The Dow Jones Industrial Average edged down 137.61 points, or 0.41%, to 31899, and the Nasdaq Composite declined 146.40 points, or 1.17%, to 12401.4. Despite Friday’s losses, all three indexes posted weekly gains. Shares of social media firms fell sharply on Friday after Twitter and Snapchat’s owner signaled advertisers had tightened their purse strings in response to a darkening economic outlook. Pinterest plunged 11.3%, Facebook-owner Meta Platforms dropped 5.6%,
Google-owner Alphabet Inc which also sells ads online, fell 3.3%.

-------------------------------

Currency Market:

- The US dollar held firm in early trading on Monday as traders sought safer assets and braced for a sharp U.S. interest rate hike later this week. The dollar index was at 106.760 points, having last week fallen from the two-decade high of 109.290 points hit in mid-July.

- The Australian dollar was flat against the greenback, while the New Zealand dollar was down 0.2% at $0.6242. Versus the Japanese yen, the dollar was up 0.2% at 136.35 . The Euro was down 0.2% at $1.01930. The British pound was down 0.1% against the dollar at $1.1993 , while euro-sterling was steady at 85.07 pence per euro .

-------------------------------

Commodities: Gold

Gold prices fell after the dollar’s rise and expectations of a US Federal Reserve interest rate hike this week dampened gold demand.

The price of yellow metal fell 0.2% to $ 1,719.87 an ounce after rising to its highest level in more than a week last Friday. The dollar rose 0.1% against rival currencies, making dollar-denominated gold more expensive for buyers holding other currencies.

-------------------------------

Commodities: Oil

Oil prices dropped extending a recent losing streak on concerns that an expected rise in U.S. interest rates would weaken fuel demand.
Brent crude futures for September settlement fell $1.19, or 1.2%, to $102.01 a barrel, down for a fourth day.

U.S. West Texas Intermediate (WTI) crude futures for September delivery slid $1.33, or 1.4%, to $93.37 a barrel, also down for a fourth day.
ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ
For more articles click here