020 7898 0500A mixed end to last week saw sterling fall against both the euro and US dollar, although it did hit a fresh 6-year high against the Australian dollar thanks to lower than expected Australian retail sales. And against expectations, given the “No” vote in Greece, sterling has opened only slightly higher against the euro first thing this morning.
We do expect to see the reaction to the Greek vote dominate the market focus this week – but there are a number of other releases from the UK which may be of interest. Tomorrow sees the release of manufacturing production figures for the month of June; following a surprise contraction throughout May, investors expect to see this figure to show a 0.2% improvement this time around. On Wednesday we have this Government’s first Budget presented to parliament – and this could may well contain a number of factors that are of interest to investors, and any surprises could see sterling movement. Thursday then sees the release of the latest interest rate decision from the Bank of England (BoE), although this is likely to pass without incident as there has been no recent indication that a rate hike is being considered or imminent.
