MUMBAI: The Indian rupee on Thursday will be helped by a drop in the dollar after Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell said that a rate hike was unlikely.
Non-deliverable forwards indicate the rupee will open mostly unchanged to the US dollar from 83.4250 in the previous session.
“The Fed was not dovish and at the same time it was not hawkish to the extent it was feared. You can see that from how the dollar and US yields came off post Powell,” a forex trader at a bank said.
The Fed and “the relief” from Tuesday suggest a “slightly” positive bias on the rupee today, he said.
The rupee managed a late recovery on Tuesday, having made an intraday low of 83.5250.
The Fed expectedly left the policy rate unchanged while acknowledging that the there has been a lack of further progress toward the 2% inflation objective in recent months.
The last three inflation readings have been higher than expected.
At the post policy press conference, Powell said that he feels monetary policy is “restrictive” and that a rate hike was “unlikely”.
While the Fed committee added a hawkish acknowledgment of the “lack of further progress” on inflation so far this year to its statement, Chair Powell offered a dovish message in his press conference, Goldman Sachs said in a note.
“The most notable aspect … was Powell’s push back against the possibility of rate hikes,” Goldman Sachs said. The dollar index and US Treasury yields retreated post Powell’s comments.
The dollar index had pulled back to 105.72 from near 106.20 before Powell’s conference.
Helped by that, Asian currencies were higher between 0.1% to 0.6%.
US bond yields dropped.
The Fed said it will slow the pace of quantitative tightening from June.
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