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The dollar rose in jittery trading on Friday, as a worldwide cyber outage that hit banks, airlines and broadcasters unsettled investors, although volatility in the currency market remained contained.
Signs of disruption in one of the world’s busiest financial centres emerged as London trade got underway.
LSEG Group, which runs the London Stock Exchange, suffered an outage that affected user access to some of its products.
By around midday in Europe, the company said its services had been restored.
Risk appetite has recoiled this week, punishing technology stocks in particular, while expectations for a rate cut as early as September from the Federal Reserve have taken a chunk out of the dollar, especially against low-interest rate currencies such as the yen and the Swiss franc.
The huge gap between US rates and those in Japan and even in Switzerland has created an opportunity for investors to sell those currencies to fund purchases of assets with higher returns such as the dollar, or super-charged tech stocks or cryptocurrencies.
The yen has also gained after suspected official buying last week from Japanese authorities, and wariness of more of the same was in the mix on Friday.
“There is a bit of a carry unwind going on and the Swissie has traded notably firmer this week as well,” Pepperstone senior analyst Michael Brown said.”
The carry unwind is perhaps part of a broader momentum unwind that we’re seeing – the tech sector has taken a bit of a battering in four out of the last five days as well,” he said.
The yen , which is set for a gain of 0,1 percent this week, was a touch weaker at 157.485 per dollar after data showed inflation in Japan picked up for a second month.
The yen has fallen more than 10 percent against the dollar this year, mostly down to the wide difference in interest rates between the US and Japan, and hit 38-year lows at the beginning of the month, triggering action from Tokyo.
“While suspected interventions do not seem to stabilise the yen, we believe monetary policy might,” said Krishna Bhimavarapu, APAC economist at State Street Global Advisors. – Reuters
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