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The USD was on the defensive ahead of the FOMC rate decision aginst the European currencies. The EU Finance Ministers provided a strategy for emergency loans in case Greece’s ?4.8B austerity measures failed to improve the projected statistics back within the Maastrict Stability Pact criteria. The Chinese currency issue and…

The 1H time-frame shows details of the action throughout the Asian-European regional sessions, which is the start of the current global session. The market stalled at the 90.40 area ahead of the Asian session, but dipped as it gone underway. However, the start of the European session brought support, but…

4H: Yesterday’s video post mentioned that there may be bottoming action at the 1.3665 area (61.8% retracement). The market dropped slightly below that but started to rally in the Asian session, had a quick correction when the European session started, and shot up again as that session went underway and…

Housing starts fell to an annual pace of 575K in February which beat the consensus forecast though it was a 5.9% decline from January’s level. While an upward revision to January’s data caused the decline to be bigger than forecast, the construction sector faced harsh winter weather during the month…

Housing starts fell 5.9 percent in February as another huge decline in multi-family starts overwhelmed a slight drop in single-family home construction. Starts of apartments and condominiums have been held back by a lack of financing and oversupply. The weather likely exaggerated the drop in February, however, which saw starts…

It’s a down day for the dollar ahead of the Fed this afternoon. The dollar index is weaker by 0.4% with notable strength in the British pound and Swiss franc spearheading weakness against the dollar. The currency market is buzzing ahead of today’s FOMC statement, which will confirm the completion…

Strong consensus expectations are that the FOMC will do nothing to rock the boat tonight since there is little evidence that suggests we believe otherwise, and since as we have pointed out, this is the first one-day meeting since September of 2008. Still, consensus is a dangerous things as the…

Despite intra-day brief fall to 1.4977, the subsequent sharp rebound from there suggests further choppy consolidation would take place and test of resistance at 1.5218 cannot be ruled out, however, break there is needed to bring stronger retracement of recent decline to 1.5289 (100% projection of 1.4781 to 1.5197 measuring…

Although the greenback resumed recent decline from 1.0899 top after meeting renewed selling interest at 1.0642 yesterday and downside bias remains for a stronger retracement of recent upmove towards 1.0509/15 (previous resistance turned support and 50% Fibonacci retracement of 1.0130 to 1.0899), however, loss of near term downward momentum would…

Housing starts dropped 5.9% to an annualized 575,000 from a revised 611,000 in January (earlier reported at 591,000). Expectations were for starts to come in at 570,000 units. Permits continued to slow, following January?s 4.7% decline, with a 1.6% fall to 612,000 units. Starts of both single-detached homes and multiple-units…