The EUR/USD currency pair confirmed an upward trend on Thursday, as the US economic reports failed to provide sufficient support for the Greenback. The Euro gained 0.17% against the US Dollar to continue a side move above the 1.1890 mark until the Friday morning session. The National Association of Realtors revealed that pending home sales in the United States fell 0.8% over the month of July, as the property market kept facing hurdles form a limited supply of available houses, which pushed prices up.

What factors would determine the future performance of gold prices?

I suppose that it is all about the outlook for the trend of interest rates in the United States. By that I mean the Treasury Inflation Protected Securities yield and the federal funds rate. In my opinion, these would be the factors that will drive the price of gold. At this point in time, our view is that the fed fund rate will be moving higher, thus, we are not anticipating much more strength in gold prices, not much beyond the $1,300 to $1,350.

Eurozone inflation was stable in July and unemployment reached its lowest rate since February 2009. In your opinion, how that can impact the ECB’s interest rates?

I think that that the ECB might be happy about the growth outlook, but inflation is still looking really subdued. There is still some more slack in the economy, which would mean the European Central Bank is fairly patient and extremely gradual in its policy.

An opinion exists that London’s euro-clearing hub works very efficiently and that making any alterations to current practices will hurt the EU economy. Therefore, it might be a purely political question rather than economic. What do you think on this matter? Why?

I think London’s clearing system does work pretty efficiently, but there are issues related to the clearing of euro-denominated securities taking place in the jurisdiction beyond the ECB’s influence that will arise once the UK leaves the EU. A great concern is how the efficiency of the overall clearing system will be affected once euro-denominated clearing moves to somewhere in the EU, more precisely, in the Euro zone. Does it make sense for banks to have one part of their clearing infrastructure in London and another part somewhere in continental Europe? In my opinion, such system certainly becomes less efficient, but the issue is whether some banks and other institutions decide to move the entire clearing infrastructure to another part of Europe. I am not sure whether we have a complete parity over that yet, but it is certainly a problem that will come forward over the next two years

On Thursday, the US Dollar was driven by bulls that pushed the given currency through the 100- and 55-hour SMAs and the monthly PP. Nevertheless, a resistance cluster formed by the weekly PP and the 200-hour SMA proved to be a solid upper limit that reversed the rate down to a relatively similar level as on Thursday morning. The failure to reach the upper boundary of the symmetrical triangle indicates that this pattern may not be strong enough any longer to confine the pair in its bounds. Thus, it is quite likely that the current momentum downwards is to persist until the weekly S1 at 110.48, possibly. Meanwhile, the upper limit could be the 100-hour SMA and the monthly PP or in case of solid upside risks resulting from US fundamentals -even the aforementioned 200-hour SMA circa 111.70.

Some experts suggest that environmental regulations, such as the US decision to quit the Paris Climate Agreement, are likely to have a zero impact on the US economy. Do you share this point of view? Why?

It depends on a period of time that you are talking about. I think that in the long run it has a negative impact. I believe that the energy sector, especially alternative energy sources, hold tremendous opportunities for economic growth. If the US is not going to push in that direction, then other counties will take that growth away. Thus, I think that within the next two years there may be no effect, but, going forward, it has a negative impact on the US economy.

Britain aims to stay in a good relationship with the European Union and continue cooperation on security and defence issues. What is your own opinion, will Britain be able to maintain a good partnership with the EU?

This is obviously the key question at the moment. We all hope that relations between Britain, the European Union and, of course, individual EU countries will remain cordial, though the negotiations are likely to be extremely difficult and complex, while there is a chance of tensions being raised and disagreements being voiced strongly at various points in time. What is important is that once negotiations are finished, we have good trading arrangements between the UK on the one side and the 27 EU countries on the other. At this point in time, it is impossible to know exactly what these trading arrangements are going to be.

The US private sector created less than expected jobs last month, suggesting that job creation started to cool after strong gains registered earlier. The ADP National Employment Report released on Thursday showed companies added 158K new jobs to the economy in June, following the preceding month’s downwardly revised figure of 230K and surpassing analysts’ expectations for an 185K increase.