Dollar falls after Powell comments

The dollar fell on Wednesday after Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell declined to intentionally strengthen his stance on inflation in a speech despite last week’s very strong jobs data.

Powell said rates would likely need to be higher than expected if the economy remained strong, but reiterated that he believed a process of “retracing inflation” was underway. Powell “hadn’t necessarily said anything substantively new,” said Chris Weston, director of research at Pepperstone. Both the market and the central bank are now only concerned with the data, so the market is currently less sensitive to the speeches of Fed officials, but much more sensitive to the data.