NFP

On Friday, the US published long-awaited statistics on the labor market. The figures came out quite decent, but the dollar reacted with a moderate decline. And the main reason is that both the favorable results of the release and the Fed's rate hikes next week are already calculated in price. EUR/USD, which on Friday defended positions above the level of 1.06, having received a fuse on the less "pigeon" rhetoric of Draghi, was trading at new weekly highs, touching the level of 1.0644. Meanwhile, USD/JPY, which previously touched a maximum of 115.50, is slipping towards the 115.00 mark.

In February, the level of payroll employment excluding the agricultural sector, grew by 235 thousand against the forecast of 190 thousand. However, exceeding the threshold of 200 thousand did not come as a surprise to the markets that increased their expectations after a strong ADP report reflecting employment growth in the private sector by almost 300 thousand. As a result, for January the forecast was revised to increase from 227 thousand to 238 thousand. Meanwhile, the unemployment rate dropped from 4.8%, to 4.7% in accordance with the forecast. Something spoiled the picture, as expected, and that was the component of salaries. Average hourly earnings increased by 0.2%, not reaching the forecast of growth by 0.3%. If this indicator turned out to be at or above expectations, the markets would get just an ideal picture of the state of the American labor market.
However, the release did its job and confirmed the appropriateness of tightening the Fed's policy next Wednesday. In principle, the regulator's decision did not depend on Friday's data, but in case of disappointing figures, there would definitely be some doubts among market participants about this.
As for the prospects for strengthening of the dollar, given the already tightened market and further tightening of the Fed policy, the currency growth potential seems very limited, although the subject of the divergence of monetary policy courses has not been canceled, which implies the preservation of the fundamentally strong positions of USD, which could be undermined if the dollar comes up too far and will displease the US administration, which has already resorted to verbal interventions.