Last week, the US stocks were subject to huge decline on Friday as worries of economic damage from the spread of the coronavirus intensified, though Wall Streets’ major indexes ended well above their session lows.

China stocks post their biggest weekly advance in a year despite the coronavirus breakout. In fact, the investors expected more policy support to shore up the world’s second-largest economy hit by the coronavirus outbreak.

European shares plummeted on Friday amid widespread fears of the coronavirus hampering business activity, with oil and gas stocks bearing the brunt of losses explained by the downward expectation of the
international economic growth.

Oil and gas stocks ended more than -8.3 percent lower at 41.51 US dollars last week, seen their worst days in more than three years as oil prices plunged to their lowest since. Crude prices were already pressured by concerns explained by the decline of the global demand and the air transport sector.

In the same way, the Planemaker Airbus dived 7.6 % by lack of new aircraft orders in February due to the disruption across aviation industries explained by the spread of coronavirus.

The EUR/USD pair increased by 2.33% and closing last week at 1.12833 after nearing 1.15, the highest since January 2019. Fears of an outright recession have gripped markets and surged investors’ worries especially because the whole US yields curve is below 1%, weighing on the dollar.

The Gold price spikes to fresh multi-month and going for higher high with strong struggled to capitalize on the move beyond the $1700 round-figure mark.

The offered tone around US oil (WTI futures on Nymex) appeared to have weakened over the last week and lose -8.3% at 41.51 US dollar due to strong selling pressure.

The selling pressure surrounding the major cryptocurrencies intensified in the last week with Bitcoin (BTC/USD) erasing more than -5.74% and slumping to its lowest level since mid-January at $8038.84.

In African currency markets, The Nigerian NAIRA recognized a small appreciation face to the US dollar and closed the week at 363.00 US dollars. The South Africa ZAR was depreciated face to the US dollar by
0.43 % and closed last week at 15.67390 US dollars.

The last week main markets prices and variations

We have a list of high impact events this week. The publication of the events can leads to a strong movement or a trend for the related currencies. The discussion of the events impacts will be done within the daily FOREX report.

The publications that have a very significant theoretic impact are:

• CAD: The Building Permits released by the Statistics Canada shows the number of permits for new construction projects. “Monday”.
• CHN: The Consumer Price Index is released by the National Bureau of Statistics of China. It is a measure of retail price variations within a representative basket of goods and services. ” Tuesday”.
• EUR: The Gross Domestic Product released by the Eurostat is a measure of the total value of all goods and services produced by the Eurozone. ”Tuesday”.
• USD: The Consumer Price Index (CPI) Ex Food & Energy released by the US Department of Labor Statistics is a measure of price movements by the comparison between the retail prices of a representative shopping basket of goods and services. ”Wednesday”.
• USD: The Initial Jobless Claims released by the US Department of Labor is a measure of the number of people filing first-time claims for state unemployment insurance. ”Thursday”.
• EUR: ECB Monetary Policy Statement and Press Conference. ”Thursday”.
• USD: HICP is an index of consumer prices calculated and published by Destatis, the Statistical Office of the European Union, on the basis of a statistical methodology that has been harmonized across all EU member states. ”Friday”.