The Australian dollar plummeted more than 3% against its U.S. counterpart on Thursday in Asia. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The AUD\/USD<\/a> pair lost 3.2% to 0.5583 by 12:30 AM ET (04:30 GMT). The pair was already down before the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) dropped interest rates to 0.25% as expected, which is a record low. <\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cThe Board will not increase the cash rate target until progress is being made towards full employment and it is confident that inflation will be sustainably within the 2\u20133% target band,\u201d said RBA Governor Philip Lowe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cAt some point, the virus will be contained and the Australian economy will recover. In the interim, a priority for the Reserve Bank is to support jobs, incomes and businesses, so that when the health crisis recedes, the country is well placed to recover strongly,\u201d he added. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Meanwhile, data showed today that Australia\u2019s unemployment rate unexpectedly declined in February.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The jobless rate fell to 5.1% from 5.3%, data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed Thursday, against expectations it would remain unchanged. <\/p>\n\n\n\n Employment jumped 26,700 last month, compared with economists\u2019 estimates of a 6,300 gain. The unemployment rate was aided by an edge down in participation to 66%.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The ABS said in the report that \u201cthere was no notable impact\u201d from the recent bushfires or COVID-19. Yet it said,\u201cthe February reference period was in the first half of the month and pre-dates the notable increases in confirmed cases in Australia of COVID-19.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The bureau added that \u201cas with other major disruption to the economy, early impacts are usually most evident in the monthly hours worked.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The USD\/JPY<\/a> pair was up 1.0% to 109.16. The Bank of Japan offered to buy 1 trillion yen ($9.2 billion) of government bonds in another unscheduled operation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The EUR\/USD<\/a> pair slipped 0.2% to 1.0893 after the European Central Bank (ECB) announced an asset purchase program worth 750 billion euros ($820 billion) to combat the impact of the coronavirus pandemic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The program will continue until central bank judges the crisis phase of the pandemic to be over, but not before the end of this year.<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cExtraordinary times require extraordinary action. There are no limits to our commitment to the euro,\u201d President Christine Lagarde said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The U.S. dollar index<\/a> was up 0.2% to 101.752. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Australian dollar plummeted more than 3% against its U.S. counterpart on Thursday in Asia. The AUD\/USD pair lost 3.2% to 0.5583 by 12:30 AM ET (04:30 GMT). The pair was already down before the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) dropped interest rates to 0.25% as expected, which is a record low. 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":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/forexvarsity.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2005","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=2005"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/forexvarsity.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2006,"href":"https:\/\/forexvarsity.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2005\/revisions\/2006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/forexvarsity.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forexvarsity.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/forexvarsity.com\/welcome\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}