By Tom Westbrook
SINGAPORE (Reuters) – Japan’s yen scaled a six-week high on Thursday, spurring speculation of an official push, while the dollar nursed broad losses as markets prepared for U.S. rate cuts in a few months.
The euro, which scaled a four-month peak overnight, hovered near that level at $1.094 and sterling was steady at $1.3007, just below the one-year top it had made in overnight trade.
The yen gained sharply on Wednesday and was up another 0.5% to touch 155.37 per dollar in the otherwise quiet early hours of the Asia session on Thursday.
Bank of Japan money market data suggested authorities may have bought nearly 6 trillion yen last week and traders said this week’s moves bore the hallmarks of further intervention, or at least of markets spooked by that prospect.
“Many traders and Japanese investors, after intervention, were looking to reload on their trades,” said National Australia Bank (OTC:NABZY) strategist Rodrigo Catril in Sydney.
“The big move (on Wednesday) would have caught them offside and triggered a little bit of a reassessment if not an unwinding of those positions.” Net yen shorts stood near a 17-year high last week.
Interest rate markets are pricing more than 60 basis points of U.S. interest rate cuts this year and some 20 basis points of hikes in Japan, narrowing the wide rates gap that had encouraged investors taking on large short positions in the yen.
Catril and other analysts also pointed to remarks from U.S. presidential candidate Donald Trump – who described the dollar’s strength and the weakness of the yen and yuan as a big problem in a Bloomberg Businessweek interview – as rattling markets.
So far this year the yen is the worst-performing G10 currency on the dollar, losing more than 9%, while the yuan is down about 2.2%.
China’s yuan rose slightly on Wednesday and will be closely watched on Thursday while traders await news of a key leadership gathering in Beijing that is expected to end later in the day.
In early offshore trade the yuan hovered around its 50-day moving average, at 7.2667 per dollar.
New Zealand’s dollar jumped through its 200-day moving average on Wednesday and was holding gains early on Thursday at $0.6076 after some sticky domestic elements of inflation gave pause to bets on imminent interest rate cuts.
The Australian dollar was steady at $0.6725.
