australian-dollar-bank-notes-calculator - AUD

The British pound is lower against the Australian dollar on Thursday afternoon following better than expected Australian jobs data that caused a dramatic slump in the exchange rate. The huge gains for the Australian dollar quickly reversed equally large gains made by the pound on Wednesday.

GBP/AUD was lower by 84 pips (-0.44%) to 1.9105 with a daily price range of 1.909 to 1.922 as of 2pm GMT, with the currency pair down from a 2020 high but holding into the 1.90 level.

The Australian dollar

The reaction to unemployment data from Australia was particularly strong because it is one of the first major economic data releases since bushfires really became a national crisis for Australia in December.

The unemployment rate in Australia fell to 5.1% from 5.2% previously and 28.9k jobs were created, well above the 15k expected in December. It was part-time employment that accounted for all the job gains with full time employment actually dipping slightly. Still markets weren’t in a mood to quibble on the details because the headline jobs growth speaks to a very resilient economy with such a big natural disaster to deal with.

The British pound

The pound crumbled against the Australian dollar early Thursday – for much the same kind of reason it had flown higher a day earlier. While on Wednesday traders had been reversing bets of a Bank of England rate cut because of strong jobs growth. On Thursday trader had to do the same, reversing any notion of interest rate cut by the Reserve Bank of Australia on February 4th.

The big news coming from the UK was that the House of Lords approved Boris Johnsons’ Brexit bill last night. It is the final confirmation that Brexit will now actually happen after months of delay. Still, the news had minimal effect on currency markets because the idea that Brexit will indeed happen on January 31st has been understood since the election. Boris Johnson won a landslide election victory promising to “Get Brexit done” by January 31st and that looks on schedule to happen as promised.


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