American focus:

The yen rose against the dollar and the euro as signs the economic recovery is slowing boosted demand for the currency as a refuge.
The Dollar Index rose for the first time in three days after earlier touching the lowest level in a month on speculation the Federal Reserve may keep trying to support economic growth. Global stocks declined.
The MSCI World Index of stocks fell 0.4 percent, and the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index declined 0.5 percent.
“The yen movements suggest that the overall risk confidence remains relatively fragile,” said Vassili Serebriakov, a currency strategist at Wells Fargo & Co. in New York. “Soft U.S. data have been dollar-negative mainly, but today that has been offset today by global equity weakness.”
“There is a perception in the market that the global economic recovery might be stalling and investors are assessing what that means to monetary policy among major economies,” said Jeremy Stretch, London-based head of currency strategy at Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce. “The yen is likely to benefit in this kind of environment.”
With the European Central Bank forecast to raise interest rates further, the shared currency also may have more room to gain, according to CIBC’s Stretch.
Producer prices in the euro region rose 6.7 percent in April from a year earlier, after a revised 6.8 percent increase in March, the European Union’s statistics office in Luxembourg said today. The March producer-price inflation rate was the highest since September 2008, the month Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. filed for bankruptcy.