The New Taiwan dollar on Friday slid against the US dollar, shedding NT$0.008 to close at NT$30.080, but still rose 0.13 percent from NT$30.120 a week earlier.
Turnover totaled US$724 million during the trading session.
The greenback opened at NT$30.100, and moved between NT$30.032 and NT$30.105 before the close.
Elsewhere on Friday, the US dollar was headed for its best week since early this month as tumbling oil prices weighed on commodity currencies and division over Europe’s emergency fund dragged on the euro.
The US dollar was near a two-and-a-half-week high against a basket of currencies and was 0.9 percent stronger for the week. It was up nearly 3 percent against the oil-sensitive Norwegian krone and about 1 percent on the euro.
Moves in Asian trading were modest, led by a drift lower in the Australian and New Zealand dollars as inconclusive results from a Gilead Sciences Inc antiviral drug trial on patients with COVID-19 unnerved traders who have been looking to headlines for direction.
“I’m running with a more bearish story for the next two or three weeks,” Westpac Banking Corp foreign exchange analyst Imre Speizer said.
“The economic data is going to be horrible. I’m betting that markets will be shocked by it, even though we know it’s coming, and that will cause risk sentiment to fall,” he said, which means selling pressure on the New Zealand dollar.
The Aussie and kiwi each shed about 0.2 percent, holding the kiwi to US$0.5996 and the Aussie at US$0.6359, beneath resistance at about US$0.64.
Both had rallied through those levels overnight as markets shrugged off dire economic news in Europe and the US, and commodity prices forged ahead.
The euro on Thursday fell to a one-month low of US$1.0756, and on Friday struggled to lift much above it after the EU agreed to build a 1 trillion euro (US$1.08 trillion) emergency fund, but left the details for later.
With Italy and Spain hit far harder than Germany by the crisis, old enmities have surfaced across a bloc that the European Central Bank said faces a cut to output as deep as 15 percent.
“We have no idea how it will be funded and this is not the panacea to stop an impending 15 percent contraction in GDP,” Melbourne-based Pepperstone Group Ltd head of research Chris Weston said.
The euro last sat at US$1.0772, while the British pound was steady at US$1.2352, down about 1.1 percent for the week, and the Japanese yen softened slightly to ¥107.64.
Preliminary goods orders data in the US and a German business sentiment survey due later on Friday were unlikely to improve investors’ mood, with any global recovery expected to be slow and patchy.
“It depends on what you mean by recovery,” said HSBC economist Frederic Neumann, who forecast an 8.4 percent annualized expansion in Asia, excluding Japan, in the second half of this year.
“The return of growth is comforting, especially for financial markets looking for a light at the end of the tunnel,” he said. “But the cumulative shortfall in demand will also mean lingering financial pressures for some borrowers and fewer available jobs.”
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