The shekel is strengthening against the dollar and weakening against the euro today. In morning inter-bank trading, the shekel-dollar exchange rate was down 0.28% from yesterday's representative rate at NIS 3.5191/$, and up 0.13% against the euro at 4.1427/€.
Yesterday, the Bank of Israel set the shekel-dollar representative rate up 0.370% from yesterday at NIS 3.529/$ and set the shekel-euro rate down 0.085% at 4.137/€.
On world forex markets, despite the stalled talks to form a new government in Germany, the euro has resumed strengthening against the dollar and UBS global head of macro strategy Yianos Kontopoulos issued a report yesterday saying that he expects the trend to continue in 2018.
The stronger euro and weaker dollar is reflected in shekel forex trading today in Tel Aviv. The shekel remains essentially robust after Israel's stronger than expected third quarter growth data, which showed GDP growing at 4.1% on an annualized basis. In addition, last week Consumer Price Index (CPI) reading for October of 0.3%, slightly higher than expected, has also reinforced the belief that inflation is moving closer to the government target range of 1%-3%, encouraging speculators to believe the Bank of Israel will go ahead with planned interest rate hikes in the second half of 2018.
Published by Globes [online], Israel business news - www.globes-online.com - on November 22, 2017
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