Today's inflation data released in the first half of the day was not very encouraging for the European Central Bank. The regulator expects to achieve a target inflation rate just below 2.0%, which is still significantly out of its reach.
Producer prices fell in June, which goes against the ECB's plans to wind down monetary stimulus measures in the form of bond purchases.
According to the European Union's statistics agency, the producer price index of the eurozone in June this year fell by 0.1% compared with May. It should be noted that the last increase of this index was recorded in January this year. The only consolation is that, compared with June last year, the index rose by 2.5%.
As seen from the recent data, the acceleration of economic growth has little effect on inflation.
Yesterday, data was released, which indicated that the euro area's GDP grew by 0.6% in the second quarter of 2017 compared to the previous quarter and by 2.1% compared to the same period of the previous year.
The current exchange rate of the euro against a number of other currencies also creates a number of setbacks to exports and could adversely affect the rate of economic growth by the fourth quarter of this year.
Today it also became known that the Purchasing Managers Index for the manufacturing sector in Switzerland increased by 0.8 points in July, to 60.9 points. Such indicators indicate very serious signs of further acceleration of activity in the manufacturing industry in Switzerland.
Nevertheless, the Swiss franc still remains under pressure against the euro and the US dollar. The USD/CHF pair rose sharply, having reached the level of 0.9700, the breakthrough of which will open the opportunity to update the July highs to around 0.9730.
Data in the second half of the day on the labor market in the US did not make have any significant impact to the market.
According to the report by Automatic Data Processing Inc. and Moody's Analytics, the number of jobs in the private sector increased by 178, 000 in July this year, while economists forecast a bigger job increase of 180,000. The June data were revised. So, the number of new jobs for the month was 191,000, not 158,000, as previously reported.
