Major Pairs

On March 21, the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) of the US Federal Reserve Board under its new chairman, Jerome Powell, raised benchmark interest rates, or the target for the federal funds rate, by 25 basis points to 1.5-1.75 percent

It’s been the year of the bitcoin bloodbath, as crypto-carnage reached new highs with bitcoins and the other well-known names in digital-currency markets extending a freefall. Likewise, Ethereum, Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash and Ripple followed a similar pattern in February of this year.

Investors are hopping on to the cryptocurrency bandwagon, with reports of cryptocurrency mining and the bitcoin fork coming out. Will the cryptocurrency prove its mettle, or is it just a designer currency that is a passing fad?

If cryptocurrencies were to be branded as the most recent addition to the existing financial instruments, they would effortlessly take over the podium as the best-performing asset class in 2017.

The US dollar is edging higher versus its key counterparts in December, as central banks from the UK, US and eurozone meet separately to take stock of the performance of their respective economies and announce their monetary-policy verdicts for the last time this year.

The economy of the United States continued its growth trajectory heading into the last month of this year. While most of the economic announcements in November revealed robust growth, inflation continued to remain stubbornly below the central bank’s target of 2 percent

The Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Bank of England voted by a 7-2 majority to raise key interest rates from 0.25 to 0.50 percent, following the penultimate MPC meeting of the year.

The pound sterling came under selling pressure versus the greenback and the euro this month, as mixed economic data from the United Kingdom and the ongoing departure negotiations with the 27 countries representing the European Union (EU) have remained grim. The UK is due to exit the European Union at the end of March 2019.

2017 has been nothing short of a rollercoaster ride for the Mexican peso. Starting with the election of US President Donald Trump, the Mexican currency suffered enormously as fears set in that the US-Mexico trade relationship would suffer enormously.

Venezuela’s political crisis is a deeply complex issue affecting nearly every aspect of everyday life. The country’s foreign-exchange reserves and trading have been quietly at the forefront of these issues for some time now, as reserves dwindle and the value of the Venezuelan bolívar falls.