UK GDP grew by 0.3% month by month in January compared to December’s drop of 0.5%. It’s the service sector that carried this gain, while manufacturing dropped off for January.
Yesterday’s release of continuing and initial jobless claims from the US showed an increase of people applying for unemployment benefits. This is release on a weekly basis, seeing movements on the job market, with yesterday’s figures being at a 2-month high.
Leading us onto today when non-farm payroll is released later in the afternoon. US job market has shown healthy signs recently and been able to deal better with interest rate hikes than expected with figures at 517k jobs created in January. This months expectation is around the 205k mark. US economy has shown to be very resilient, leading to good job figures and therefor this data will be of high importance later today. Inflation continue to be the main topic, leading to interest rate hikes from central banks. Leading us onto the upcoming weeks were we will see rate decisions from the Federal Reserve (22nd of March), ECB (16th of March) and BoE (23rd of March).
GBP/EUR 1.1284 GBP/USD 1.1955 GBP/AED 4.3811
GBP/AUD 1.8140 GBP/CHF 1.1113 GBP/CAD 1.6540
GBP/NZD 1.9565 EUR/USD 1.0586 GBP/ZAR 21.875