NEW YORK: The euro plunged in Asia on Monday as Greece’s anti-austerity Syriza party won the country’s snap national elections Sunday, but may descend shy of an unlimited majority in the 300-seat parliament and need some outside support, whereas the yen strengthened after better than expected trade data and safe-haven status.
EUR/USD traded at 1.110, down 0.84%, while AUD/USD trended lower as well at 0.78614, down 0.55%. USD/JPY traded at 117.33, down 0.34%.
The party has pledged to force Greece’s creditors to renegotiate the terms of the country’s €240 billion euro financial bailout, which has roiled markets and imperiled moves to provide more funding for the country.
Japan’s December trade balance showed a deficit of ¥660.7 billion,narrower than the deficit of ¥740 billion yen expected, and narrower than the ¥829 billion deficit seen in November.
The Bank of Japan’s minutes on monetary policy showed its focus on inflation is with expectations from consumers are key for policy going forward.
Last week, the euro fell to fresh 11-year lows against the dollar on Friday and hit a seven year trough against the pound, a day after the European Central Bank launched a large scale quantitative easing program to combat slowing growth and inflation in the euro area.
The drop in the single currency came after ECB President Mario Draghi unveiled a €1.2 trillion asset purchase program on Thursday. The central bank will purchase €60 billion in assets per month, starting in March and continuing until late 2016.
Draghi said the program would help return inflation back to the bank’s 2% target. Expectations had been building ahead of the ECB meeting after official figures showed that the annual rate of inflation in the euro area fell into negative territory in December, dropping 0.2%.Draghi acknowledged the action the ECB took last year was “insufficient” to ward off the threat of deflation in the region.
The dollar remained broadly stronger, boosted by the diverging monetary policy stance between the Federal Reserve and central banks in Europe and Japan.
The Bank of Japan held off on expanding its monetary easing scheme on Wednesday and instead expanded a loan scheme aimed at boosting lending.
The U.S. dollar index, which measures the greenback’s strength against a trade-weighted basket of six major currencies, rose 51% to 95.81.
