The U.S. dollar was flat on Friday in Asia following reports that the Federal Reserve is considering adopting a wait-and-see approach to rate hikes.<\/p>\n
The\u00a0<\/span>U.S. Dollar Index<\/a><\/span>\u00a0<\/span>that tracks the greenback against a basket of other currencies last traded at 96.787 by 11:54 PM ET (04:54 GMT), up 0.02%.<\/p>\n The Wall Street Journal reported that the Fed could tighten monetary policy at a slower pace than expected.<\/p>\n The news came after Fed chairman Jerome Powell delivered a bullish assessment of the U.S. economy on Thursday.<\/p>\n \u201cOur economy is currently performing very well overall, with strong job creation and gradually rising wages,\u2019\u2019 said Powell in his final scheduled public remarks before the central bank goes into a blackout period before its Dec. 18-19 policy meeting. \u201cIn fact, by many national-level measures, our labour market is very strong.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n The Fed is expected to raise interest rates again at its Dec. 18-19 meeting, which would be its fourth hike this year. However, traders have reportedly reduced their bets on 2019 rate increases amid stock-market losses and worries over an escalating trade war between the U.S. and China.<\/p>\n “We’ve already heard from (Fed Chairman Jerome) Powell that he thinks the neutral rate has moved quite far in quite a short period of time,” said Bart Wakabayashi, Tokyo branch manager at\u00a0<\/span>State Street\u00a0<\/span><\/span><\/span>(NYSE:STT<\/a><\/span>) Bank.<\/p>\n “The guidance going forward will be key to yields and equity market moves, which right now foreign exchange markets seem to be reacting to.”<\/p>\n Meanwhile, the\u00a0<\/span>Chinese yuan<\/a><\/span>\u00a0<\/span>fell 0.2% against the U.S. dollar as the People’s Bank of China (PBOC) set the yuan reference rate at 6.8664 vs the previous day’s fix of 6.8599.<\/p>\n The\u00a0<\/span>USD\/JPY<\/a><\/span>\u00a0<\/span>pair traded 0.2% higher after the Bank of Japan’s (BoJ) Governor Kuroda said in a statement that a rate hike from the US Federal Reserve does not necessarily require a response move from the BoJ.<\/p>\n The central bank is watching knock-on risks from trade frictions and Brexit proceedings carefully, he added.<\/p>\n Elsewhere, the\u00a0<\/span>AUD\/USD<\/a><\/span>\u00a0<\/span>pair was unchanged at 0.7233.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The U.S. dollar was flat on Friday in Asia following reports that the Federal Reserve is considering adopting a wait-and-see approach to rate hikes. The\u00a0U.S. Dollar Index\u00a0that tracks the greenback against a basket of other currencies last traded at 96.787 by 11:54 PM ET (04:54 GMT), up 0.02%. The Wall Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"rop_custom_images_group":[],"rop_custom_messages_group":[],"rop_publish_now":"initial","rop_publish_now_accounts":[],"rop_publish_now_history":[],"rop_publish_now_status":"pending","_themeisle_gutenberg_block_has_review":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,10,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1131","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-homepage","category-latest-news","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forexvarsity.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/forexvarsity.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/forexvarsity.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forexvarsity.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forexvarsity.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1131"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/forexvarsity.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1132,"href":"https:\/\/forexvarsity.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1131\/revisions\/1132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forexvarsity.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1131"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forexvarsity.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1131"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forexvarsity.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1131"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}