NEW YORK (Reuters) – The U.S. dollar continued to rise on Tuesday after hawkish remarks from a Federal Reserve speaker, while stocks ended higher with a boost from Amazon even as curbs to control the spread of COVID-19 raised the fear of a second wave of lockdowns.
Crude rose after a hard fall on Monday, while stocks in Europe and Wall Street more than offset the losses elsewhere. The dollar index was having its strongest two-day run since April.
Sterling took a hit after British Prime Minister Boris Johnson told Britons to go back to working from home, along with new curbs on pubs, bars and restaurants that he said could be in place for as long as six months without some form of vaccine.
“As we all know, the virus doesn’t live in a vacuum and what you see in one country or region will affect other places. Economically it could have an effect,” said Minh Trang, senior FX trader at Silicon Valley Bank.
The dollar also got a lift after Chicago Fed President Charles Evans mentioned the prospect of raising interest rates.
“All we’ve been hearing from the Fed for the last few months is we’re not going to hike rates at any point in the foreseeable future. Then Evans came in and challenged that narrative, so the market got caught off-guard,” said Erik Nelson, macro strategist at Wells Fargo Securities in New York.
The dollar index rose 0.403%, with the euro down 0.5% to $1.171.
The Japanese yen weakened 0.29% versus the greenback at 104.97 per dollar, while Sterling was last trading at $1.2738, down 0.59% on the day.
The 5.7% lift from Amazon was large enough to boost stocks on Wall Street even as the United States reached 200,000 COVID-19-related deaths and as the passage of more stimulus to help the coronavirus-battered economy became more unlikely.
The Dow Jones Industrial Average rose 140.48 points, or 0.52%, to 27,288.18, the S&P 500 gained 34.51 points, or 1.05%, to 3,315.57 and the Nasdaq Composite added 184.84 points, or 1.71%, to 10,963.64.
The pan-European STOXX 600 index rose 0.20% and MSCI’s gauge of stocks across the globe gained 0.43%.
Emerging market stocks lost 0.69%. MSCI’s broadest index of Asia-Pacific shares outside Japan closed 1.01% lower.
U.S. Treasury debt yields edged lower most of the session but ended little changed as stocks rose, with benchmark 10-year notes recently yielding 0.6708%, from 0.671% late on Monday.
Oil prices rose as analysts took the view that renewed lockdown restrictions in Europe would have only a limited impact on fuel demand, partly reversing a steep drop in prices the previous day.
U.S. crude recently rose 0.61% to $39.60 per barrel and Brent was at $41.74, up 0.72% on the day.
Spot gold dropped 0.6% to $1,901.41 an ounce.
(Reporting by Rodrigo Campos; additional reporting by Sinéad Carew, Laura Sanicola, Gertrude Chavez-Dreyfuss, Herb Lash and Chuck Mikolajczak; editing by Chris Reese and Jonathan Oatis)
