The US dollar rose on the rising expectations of a Fed rate hike
The US dollar rose on the rising expectations of a Fed rate hike, but the gains were capped as many market players looked to the Group of Seven finance chiefs meeting later this week.
The dollar index, which tracks the currency against a basket of six major peers rose 0.2 per cent to 94.758.
The euro slipped 0.2 per cent to $1.12920.
IMF proposing significant debt relief for Greece, report claims
The International Monetary Fund has proposed to the eurozone that Greece should not have any debt repayments to make before 2040, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal.
The Fund wants Athens to be excused from paying interest and principal for the next 24 years and for its debt repayments to be spread out between 2040 and roughly 2080.
This would involve fixing the interest rate at which the eurozone lends to Greece at the current average of 1.5 percent.
The Washington-based organization reportedly believes these interventions would keep Greece’s debt repayments to below 15 percent of GDP per year, which it believes is sustainable.
Greece currently owes eurozone members and institutions just over 200 billion euros.
Brent oil prices near $50, driven by global outages
International Brent crude benchmark crawled closer to $50 a barrel on Wednesday as outages in Africa and Canada and production declines outside of the Middle East region fuelled expectations of a tighter supply market.
On the New York Mercantile Exchange, light, sweet crude futures for delivery in June CLM6, -0.14% traded at $48.47 a barrel, up $0.16 in the Globex electronic session. July Brent crude LCON6, -0.10% on London’s ICE Futures exchange rose $0.10 to $49.39 a barrel. Brent prices were last above $50 in November 2015.
Oil prices surged overnight, propelled by reports that Canadian forest fires forced more oil-site evacuations, threatening to delay the return of at least one million barrels a day of Canadian oil-sands production to the market.
Continuing military attacks on oil infrastructures in Nigeria and instability in Libya have also curtailed the countries’ oil operations. Meanwhile, output from heavyweight Latin American oil producers is likely to slip 2.4% on-year in 2016 by 250,000 barrels a day due to scant investment, said BMI Research.
Reference: BusineeLine, CME Group FedWatch, Ekathimerini, Market
Thai
Eng