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The Australian dollar (AUD) halted two days of gains against the US dollar (USD) as traders adopted a cautious approach ahead of the release of US non-farm payrolls (NFP) data. The non-farm payrolls data may provide more clues as to how much the Federal Reserve (Fed) is expected to cut interest rates this month.
The Australian dollar found support from positive trade balance data released on Thursday. In addition, Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) Governor Michele Bullock gave a speech at the Anika Foundation in Sydney on the theme of “The Cost of High Inflation”, saying that it is still time to consider cutting interest rates. premature. Currently, the committee does not expect to be able to lower interest rates in the short term.
The dollar continued to fall after dovish comments from Federal Reserve officials. However, positive key economic data may have limited the dollar’s downside. The U.S. ISM services PMI rose to 51.5 in August from 51.4 in July, higher than market expectations of 51.1.
Chicago Fed President Austan Goolsbee said on Friday that longer-term trends in the job market and inflation data justify the Fed easing interest rate policy soon and then steadily over the next year. FXStreet’s FedTracker, which uses a custom artificial intelligence model to rate the tone of Fed officials’ speeches on a scale of 0 to 10 from dovish to hawkish, rated Goolsby’s speech as neutral with a score of 3.8.
