The dollar rose slightly to around ¥109.10 in lackluster Tokyo trading Thursday.
At 5 p.m., the dollar stood at ¥109.09, up from ¥108.83 at the same time Wednesday. The euro was at $1.2205, down from $1.2243, and at ¥133.15, down from ¥133.25.
After topping ¥109.10 in overnight trading on a rise in U.S. long-term interest rates, the dollar strengthened further in the morning thanks to purchases by Japanese importers for settlement purposes.
But the greenback soon met with position-squaring selling by domestic exporters.
The dollar-yen pair became almost standstill at around ¥109.10 in the afternoon, with players taking to the sidelines to wait for a speech by Andrea Enria, the European Central Bank’s top supervisor, and U.S. economic indicators including January-March gross domestic product later the same day.
Market attention was also focused on Friday’s U.S. personal consumption expenditures in April.
Ahead of those events, “there is no need to trade actively,” said an official at a bank-affiliated securities firm.
Amid receding expectations for the U.S. Federal Reserve’s asset purchase tapering, “the dollar lacks upward momentum while its downside remains solid,” a currency broker said.
The dollar-yen pair is unlikely to move wildly also because the current global stock uptrend tends to prompt risk-on selling of the yen, a Japanese bank official pointed out.
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