Tuesday set off with unemployment rate and average earnings for the UK. Noticing a lift for the unemployment rate up to 5%, its highest level in 2025. Expectations were that it would rise from 4.8% to 4.9%, indicating that there are more people than forecasted that finding difficulties with job openings. While more people are out of job, people with employment also noticed a slowdown in average earnings, only growing by 4.6% (4.8% including bonuses). This combination of more people without a job and people with job noticing that their salary is not growing as previous saw GBP erase all its gains from yesterday to the EUR. GBP is already in a volatile state, which we have seen in the last few weeks with losses against both the EUR and USD. This fuels uncertainty upon the UK economic situation and with the budget coming closer, we can expect continuing fluctuations for GBP pairs.
We did see in this morning session that Germany’s ZEW economic sentiment index was released too, coming out below its expectations and previous figures. Even if its one of its lower reading in the last few months, markets have not taken much care to it as of yet and its likely markets will now shift their focus to German inflation rate that can indicate the potential pressure put on business and house holds and also dictate the consumers confidence moving forward.
GBP/EUR 1.1337 GBP/USD 1.3124 GBP/AED 4.8219
GBP/AUD 2.0130 GBP/CHF 1.0532 GBP/CAD 1.8420
GBP/NZD 2.3269 EUR/USD 1.1562 GBP/ZAR 22.5441