Central European currencies eased on Friday, ending the week on a down note in the wake of economic data highlighting the slack in the region's economies and pointing to possible central bank interest rate cuts ahead. Poland's zloty eased as figures showed the slowest rise in corporate wages in two years in July.
Traders closed some positions in the forint before a long weekend in Hungary, where Monday is a national holiday, and after figures confirmed earlier this week that the economy slipped into recession in the second quarter of the year. But Hungarian stocks rose, benefiting from better-than-expected results from OTP Bank that lifted shares in the bank by 2 percent.
The zloty eased 0.6 percent against the euro to 4.079 by 1412 GMT. Hungarian markets have priced in a 25 basis point cut in the central bank's 7 percent base rate for a meeting on August 28. The forint eased 0.4 percent versus the euro to 278.6 in illiquid trade. The forint shed 0.7 percent over the week, while the zloty was flat. The crown even firmed 0.6 percent as it broke through a key technical level at 25.0 and short positions against high-yielding peers like the zloty were unwound, dealers said.
The week's biggest winner was Romania's leu, which moved further away from its August 3 record lows and gained 1 percent against the euro over the week, even though on Friday it eased 0.1 percent to 4.485. Romanian figures showed this week that the economy grew half a percent in the second quarter from the previous three months after two quarters of contraction.
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