By: Barbara Zigah
The common currency Euro struck a 2-week trough against the safe haven currencies in Asian trading today as an emergency meeting looms for Eurozone policy makers, with the focus on peripheral contagion worries in Italy, the third largest economy within the Eurozone. On Friday, bond yields for Italian debt instruments surged to record highs, giving rise to investor sentiment that the Italian nation could soon follow Greece.
As reported at 12:39 p.m. (JST) in Tokyo, the Euro slipped against the U.S. Dollar to $1.4201, a decline of 0.4%, but off the 2-week low of $1.4187 struck earlier on the EBS trading platform. Against the Swiss Franc, the Euro traded at 1.1909 Swiss Francs, a loss of 0.2% and edging closer to the record of 1.1808 Swiss Francs struck last month on the EBS platform. One FX strategist in Tokyo believes that risk aversion is likely to cause the common currency to underperform over the near term.
In spite of last Friday’s dismal U.S. payrolls report, the greenback is finding some support, though more as a factor of Euro weakness than Dollar strength. The U.S. Dollar Index, a gauge of the greenback’s strength against a weighted basket of currencies rose to 75.332 .DXY, up from the low of 74.843 .DXY struck in N.Y. during Friday’s trading session.