EUR/USD Hits Monthly Low After ECB Intervention

EUR/USD hit new monthly minimum at 1.3606 today, bouncing back from both the psychological support of 1.3600 and technical support level around 1.3605. One of the main reason for the vigorous dollar behavior can be seen in ECB today's currency intervention of more than €130 billions. Such a harsh step was needed to prevent a highly possible financial market collapse.
Economical statistics which came this day from the Unites States of America strengthened USD even further. Advance retail sales came out at 0.3% growth compared to 0.2% expected and retail sales excluding autos came out at 0.4% compared to 0.3% expected. Manufacturers' and trade inventories, seasonly adjusted, are estimated at 0.4% growth compared to May 2007 (at the expected level).

U.S. Consumer Sentiments at Highs while Dollar at Lows

Today the preliminary consumers sentiment index (by University of Michigan) came out showing surprisingly good results - 92.4 against 86.0 expected - a historically high level of consumers confidence which indicates an uptrend the economy of United States. While consumer sentiment index is at its highest levels, dollar is suffering a continuous EUR/USD rally which showed a new maximum (for more than ten years period) at 1.3813 level today. Perhaps, strong macroeconomic indicators from U.S. prevented EUR/USD from keeping above 1.3800 mark, but it can be broken again at any time soon. Some other U.S. statistics became available today - business inventories growth in May increased from 0.4% to 0.5% (while a growth slowdown to 0.3% was expected). Advance monthly retail sales for June came out unexpectedly bad - falling down by 0.9% (they were expected to remain intact) - which is quite strange considering the high consumers sentiment index.