The US greenback begins robust in a giant week

There was a lively debate last week on the drivers of US dollar weakness.

The nomination of Scott Bessent as Treasury Secretary seemed to kick off the move but it also came (and extended) as we counted down to month-end.

Today we’ve gotten a portion of the answer as the US dollar has bounced back broadly and is the best performing G10 currency. Now some of that might be Trump’s bizarre BRICS threat but I think there is an unwind of the dollar overshoot late last week in play.

The good news is that we can get back to fundamentals this week with a full slate of US economic data to come, starting with today’s ISM manufacturing survey and ending with Friday’s non-farm payrolls report. Today we will also be looking for statistics and commentary around Black Friday shopping, though I caution that annual skews around the timing of Black Friday and the secular shift to online and earlier Christmas shopping make them near-useless.