Markets Taking a Breather – Currency Thoughts
Markets Taking a Breather
April 15, 2026
President Trump continues to dangle the chances of a deal with Iran happening soon and the April 21st ceasefire deadline getting extended. Dual blockades of the Strait of Hormuz are containing shipping traffic through the water body to a minimum but reportedly not zero.
After several days with wide swings in financial market values, investors have taken a breather this Wednesday. Net overnight movements in the dollar have been marginal, with no change in its relationships with the euro, sterling, loonie, and kiwi. The price of West Texas Intermediate crude oil ($91.21 per barrel) is just 0.2% below yesterday’s closing level. That’s close to the mid-point point of the 2026-to-date range but still 63% above the low boundary set very early in January, and I can attest to paying $4.70 for regular gasoline from Shell just yesterday in the wider New York City area. Gold’s price has also edged down 0.2%, while silver and Bitcoin are between flat and 0.1% firmer. Ten-year sovereign debt yields in North America, Europe and Japan are narrowly mixed, ranging between plus or minus two basis points. Stock markets climbed 2.1% in South Korea, 1.6% in India and 1.2% in Taiwan but more contained elsewhere in the Pacific Rim, Europe, the United States and Canada.
Wednesday’s data menu has featured a lot more price data, and still to come is the Federal Reserve Beige Book due at 14:00 EDT. The IMF/World Bank spring meetings continue. Updated IMF projections of GDP growth anticipate U.S. expansion of 2.3% this year followed by 2.1% in 2027 which exceeds that in the euro area of 1.1% followed by 1.2%, 0.8% and then 1.3% in the U.K., and just 0.7% and 0.6% in Japan. Projected growth in China falls to 4.4% this year and 4.0% in 2026 and is expected to be exceeded by 6.5% in India.
U.S. import prices rose 0.8% last month, their third monthly increase of at least 0.6% in a row and enough to lift the 12-month import price inflation pace to a 15-month high of 2.6%. That ups from 1.0% in February and zero percent as recently as December. The 12-month rate of decline in the cost of imported fuel nearly halved to 6.0%, but an unexpectedly small 0.3 percentage point rise in the non-fuel component of the index made the latest import price inflation estimate considerably lower than analysts were anticipating.
U.S. export prices jumped 1.6% between February and March, more or less as expected and enough to raise the year-on-year pace to to a 40-month high of 5.6% from 3.8% in February and a low last May of 1.9%.
As bilateral damage from America’s war against Iran, French consumer price inflation nearly doubled in March to a 14-month high of 1.7% from 0.9% in February and January’s 61-month low of 0.3%. But just as with supply chain disruptions related to the Covid Pandemic and large and erratically shifting U.S. tariff hikes, this third major supply-side shock in the space of six-plus years is impacting inflation of most countries unfavorably and will continue to do so from the indeterminent future.
In Argentina, consumer price inflation had peaked in September 2022 at 292.2% and dropped to 31.3% last October. But progress has stalled, confining the CPI to a range between the 31.3% low and 33.6% over the past eight months, including 32.6% in March.
Following a 0.3% increase in February, Polish consumer prices jumped 1.1% last month (most in 20 months) and lifted Poland’s inflation rate to 3.0% from 2.1% in the first two months of this year.
Wholesale Indian price inflation of 3.88% in March exceeded market expectations of around 3.0% and was its highest in 38 months, and the 12-month change in fuel costs swung from February’s 3.8% drop to a 22-month high of +1.9%.
South Korean import price inflation clocked in at 8.4% last month, up from 1.6% in February.
Greek CPI inflation of 3.9% last month, a 34-month high, was up from 2.7% in February and 1.9% in January.
Bucking the upward trend in most economies, Azerbaijani CPI inflation of 5.6% was fractionally lower than in January or February but still well above a reading of zero percent back in April 2024. Likewise, Slovakian CPI inflation last month slipped to a 15-month low of 3.5% but was more than a percentage point above the 2.1% reading in mid-2024.
Other U.S. data highlights today included the monthly housing market index compiled by the National Association of Home Builders, dropped by four index points this month to 34. The NY Fed’s Empire State Manufacturing survey in April produced a 5-month high of 11.0 versus a reading in March of -0.2. U.S. mortgage applications had declined in four straight week by a combined 29.2% but broke that streak with a 1.8% increase in the first full week of April, helped by a nine-basis point drop in the 30-year fixed mortgage rate to 6.42%.
Today’s main European data release was for industrial production in the euro area, which slightly exceeded expectations with a monthly rise of 0.4% and a year-on-year 0.6% decline that matched February’s figure. Industrial production had risen 1.5% in 2025 but was 1.0% lower in January-February combined than in the average in the final quarter of last year.
Core domestic private machinery orders in Japan leaped 13.6% in February and were 24.7% greater than in the year-earlier month.
India’s trade balance has been particularly victimized by higher U.S. tariffs, threats to anyone buying oil from Russia, and Middle Eastern wars. The first quarter trade deficit of $82.5 billion was 38.5% wider than a year earlier, and India’s jobless rate last month of 5.1% followed a reading of 4.9% in February.
On-year growth in Brazilian retail sales imploded to an 11-month low of 0.2% from 2.7% in January.
Copyright 2026, Larry Greenberg. All rights reserved.
Tags: Euroland industrial production, Indian wholesale prices, U.S. import and export prices, Updated IMF GDP growth forecasts
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