This Week’s European Calendar

Featured \ Tradervox \ 3:34 AM EDT \ February 20th, 2012

Friday was a remarkable day as far as the Euro’s performance is concerned. The EUR/USD had one of its typical blockbuster days we have become accustomed to. It fell 26 pips below its 1.3000 resistance point earlier in the week before rallying to close the week at 1.3156.EUR/JPY also had its share of bumps as it ranged between 102.00 and 103.00 before eventually rallying and closing the week at 104.58.

Euro zone reports we saw last Friday came in mixed as German PPI beat all our expectations at 0.6% while the current account balance fell short of expectations and showed a meager 2.0 billion EUR surplus. What however kept the euro going strong against its major counterparts was the increased optimism surrounding the Greek debt deal as the European Central Bank came closer to swapping its existing Greek bond holdings for new bonds. Although the central bank hasn't announced the details of this potential swap deal, most market participants interpreted this as a sign that Greece would eventually have an easier time paying off its debt obligations.

Traders are keenly awaiting the Greek Parliament's decision on debt restructuring, which concerns the rest of Greece's bond holders. Dubbed as the Collective Action Clause, the proposed legislation could make private bondholders to forego their profits on their debt holdings. As for economic data, the top tier reports on euro zone's calendar include the German and French services and manufacturing PMI due on Wednesday and the German IFO business climate figure due Thursday. Other than those potentially high-impact releases, the coast is clear for the euro zone, which means that traders will probably focus on the developments in the Greek debt situation.

This week, the pound will be one of the most closely watched currencies as the U.K. has a couple big events on the calendar.

We'll start things off with the Rightmove HPI due at 11:40 pm GMT today. Look for it to show a 4.1% increase following the previous month's 0.8% slide. Then at 9:30 am GMT tomorrow, we'll take a look at the public sector net borrowing report, which is slated to show a deficit of 8.9 billion GBP following the previous month's 10.8 billion GBP.
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  1. sarbe
    sarbe
    Rating 0
    Commented: February 20th, 2012
    Well, looks like the things are improvements for the euro-zone, however, I see that investors, like me, :) have high expectations in the next events. I wonder if the oil cut off from Iran could affect the economic fundamentals in pheriferic euro-zone countries, I heard that Greece could be one of the affected in this matter, Spain not much, but in general looks to me that Greek´s debt deal is on good way. But for how long time?. Thanks Nick.

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