The British pound on Thursday stabilised as the Brexit project entered a fresh holding pattern, while the dollar traded flat as traders took a breather from Sino-U.S. trade headlines. Currency markets are also sticking to tight ranges ahead of key central bank meetings this week and next with the euro zone, Japan and United States due to review policy. Sterling held at $1.2911 after Britain's parliament backed a withdrawal deal, but rejected the government's tight timetable, while European Union members delayed deciding whether to grant a three-month extension to the October 31 leaving date. The pound has soared 6 percent in two weeks of volatile trade since British Prime Minister Boris Johnson flagged and then clinched a deal with the EU on the terms of Britain's exit from the bloc. "Sterling remains at the centre of the focus for forex markets," said Michael McCarthy, chief market strategist at brokerage CMC Markets in Sydney. "It looks like traders are weighing up the current parliamentary shenanigans versus the seeming inevitability of a Brexit," he said. Commonwealth Bank of Australia analysts reckon the pound will stay rangebound between $1.3000 and $1.2800 until things become clearer. European Council President Donald Tusk said he recommended the leaders of the EU's 27 other member states back a delay, with senior EU diplomats saying a three-month delay is most likely. Other majors were stable without much news to move the greenback. "With trade negotiations now moving out of the headlines, there doesn't seem much to spur the dollar in either direction," CMC Market's McCarthy said. Positive comments from U.S. and Chinese leaders earlier in the week about progress negotiating a truce in their trade dispute had rallied trade-exposed currencies. That has begun to run out of steam as concerns about the health of the U.S. economy returned to the fore. Tech industry bellwether Texas Instruments posted a disappointing earnings outlook on Tuesday, followed overnight by signs of a slowdown in Microsoft Corp's cloud computing division. Traders also await U.S. Vice President Mike Pence's speech later in the day, after his strong criticism of China in a speech in October last year escalated bilateral tensions and triggered a global share selloff. For now, the dollar was steady in Asian trade, gaining marginally against the Australian and New Zealand dollars while slipping marginally against the euro and Japanese yen. Against a basket of currencies, the dollar was flat at 97.459. It stood at 108.65 yen, and drifted higher from a five-week low touched against the kiwi on Tuesday, with the New Zealand dollar buying $0.6420. The Australian dollar bought $0.6851. The Chinese yuan was flat at 7.0623 in offshore trade. The euro held at $1.1132 with traders looking to euro zone manufacturing and services data and the outcome of a European Central Bank meeting, both due later on Thursday. "Small improvements across France, Germany and pan-Eurozone and for both manufacturing, services and composite readings are the consensus expectation," National Australia Bank's Head of FX Strategy, Ray Attrill, said in a note. "EUR will be sensitive to deviations one side or the other of this." The ECB is all but certain to leave policy unchanged on Thursday, six weeks after its last meeting at which it launched new asset purchases, a rate cut and a pledge to open the money taps further if needed. Crypto-currency bitcoin plunged as far as 11 percent overnight to a 5-month low of $7,258.00 after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sounded downbeat about the prospect of Facebook's crypto project, Libra. Also weighing on the digital currency was the announcement from Google that it has achieved a breakthrough in research on a quantum computer. If fully developed, a vast computing power of quantum computer is expected to obliterate existing cryptographic technologies. Source: Reuters
