American focus: the dollar fell

The dollar weakened against most major currencies after the release of US GDP data. The US economy is moderately decreased at the beginning of this year, as the harsh weather conditions and a stronger dollar eroded demand for American goods. It became known from the revised data submitted by the Ministry of Commerce.

According to the report, the seasonally adjusted gross domestic product fell by 0.7% in the first quarter. Earlier, it was assumed that the economy grew by 0.2% from January to March. Analysts had expected GDP to decline by 0.1%. The Ministry of Commerce said that it was the third quarterly decline since mid-2009.

The latter decrease was due to the release of new data that indicated a substantial trade deficit and the slow pace of restocking by firms than previously estimated. These events add to the already gloomy picture, namely the weakness in consumer spending and business investment decline.

The report also stated that corporate profits after taxes, without inventory valuation and capital consumption adjustments, in the last three months of 2014 increased by 3.1% compared with + 9.2% for the same period last year.

Most economists expect the economy to return momentum by the end of the year. In addition, they note that there are already the first signs of spring have a small rebound. According to the latest forecasts, the GDP will grow by about 2% in the current quarter.

Ministry of Commerce also noted that consumer spending, accounting for more than two-thirds of output, rose in the first quarter by 1.8% against the initial estimate of + 1.9%. It was also much slower than the growth of 4.4% in the fourth quarter. Business investment - reflect the cost of construction, engineering, and research and development - fell by 2.8% (up to the end of 2009). Initially it reported a decline of 3.4%. Meanwhile, exports fell by 7.6% (previously reported -7.2%), while government spending fell by 1.1% (-0.8% initially).

Little support for the euro earlier had data on lending in the euro area. A report published by the ECB showed that the growth rate of monetary aggregate M3 accelerated to 5.3% in April, against + 4.6% in March. Experts expect that this figure will increase by 4.9%. In the period from February to April, the average annual growth rate of M3 was 4.7% compared with 4.2% the previous three months (January to March 2015). Regarding the main components of M3, the growth rate of M1 increased to 10.5% in April from 10.0% in March. The growth rate of short-term deposits other than overnight deposits (M2-M1) amounted to -3.3% in April, as in the previous month. We also learned that the annual growth rate of deposits placed by households increased to 2.9% in April from 2.8% in the previous month, while the annual growth rate of deposits placed by non-financial corporations decreased to 4.3% from 4 6%. Finally, the growth rate of deposits placed by non-monetary financial corporations (except insurance corporations and pension funds) increased to 16.0% in April to 14.6%.

The pound extended losses against the US dollar. The pressure on the British currency continues to provide yesterday's weak GDP data for the UK. Recall that in real terms, GDP increased by 0.3% between the fourth quarter of 2014 and the first quarter of 2015. It is worth emphasizing, unedited figure was compared with the previous estimate of GDP, published April 28. Analysts expect that the economy will expand by 0.4% against growth of 0.6% in the fourth quarter. Compared with the first quarter of 2014 UK GDP (in real terms) increased by 2.4%, also in line with the preliminary data published earlier. However, experts predicted expansion of 2.5% against growth of 3.0% in the fourth quarter. The ONS said that business investment grew by 1.7 percent during the first three months of the year (up from the second quarter of 2014) against the forecast of 1.0 percent and economists decline of 0.9 percent at the end of 2014. But trade was the main "brake" of the economy, subtracting 0.9 percentage points from quarterly GDP growth. Meanwhile, household spending rose 0.5 percent, slightly slowing the pace compared to the end of 2014.