020 7898 0500The euro weakened against sterling and the dollar yesterday following the release of some disappointing data from Germany. Retail sales had been expected to grow by 0.8% in March, but they actually declined by 0.6%. Somewhat surprisingly, they actually came in better than expected on a year-on-year basis.
The other release of note was the German inflation rate which came in as expected at 1.6%. While the aforementioned retail sales were disappointing, it is perhaps the ECB’s recent remarks that interest rates would be kept on hold for the foreseeable future which led to the euro’s poor performance. However, as we have said before, this will not cause Mario Draghi any discomfort, as it is known he favours a weak euro.
It is a fairly quiet day for eurozone economic data today, but tomorrow promises to be extremely busy, with a raft of PMI data, the unemployment rate for March, and the eurozone’s GDP growth rate for the first quarter of 2018.
