By Peter Nurse

Investing.com – The US dollar lost positions at the start of trading on Monday in Europe, as the Federal Reserve Chairman’s appearance before the US Congress prompted caution earlier in the week.

By 09:00 AM ET (0900 GMT), the , which tracks the currency against a basket of six other major currencies, was down 0.1% at 104.403, after posting a weekly loss for the first time last week. since January.

Recent remarks by Federal Reserve policymakers have pointed to further interest rate hikes to combat the , which is proving more persistent than expected.

This continued over the weekend; the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco, declared that “to put this episode of high inflation behind us, it will probably be necessary to tighten further monetary policy for a longer time.”

The president of the Richmond Federal Reserve Bank, , declared on Friday that he could foresee a scenario in which he would push the benchmark interest rates of the United States to the range of 5.5%-5.75%, a point percentage above the current range.

Thus, the focus is on Powell, who will present the Fed’s semi-annual monetary policy report to the Senate on Tuesday and to the House of Representatives on Wednesday.

Traders fear that Powell will try to temper expectations of a potential rate hike later in the month.

The Fed slowed the pace of rate hikes to 25 basis points at its last meeting on February 1, after December’s 50 basis point hike that followed four consecutive 75 basis point hikes.

For its part, the pair rises 0.2% to the 1.0653 level, after rising 0.8% last week after the president of the European Central Bank, indicated that interest rate hikes from the central bank may have to continue beyond the 50 basis point hike forecast for March.

Eurozone retail sales for January will be published this Monday and everything indicates that they will show growth of 1.0% for the month as a whole, which is an improvement on the 2.7% drop in the previous month.

The pair is set to rise 0.1% to 6.9174, with the yuan falling after the Chinese government announced this weekend that it has set a 2023 GDP target of 5%, a lower stance. cautious than expected from Beijing about an economic recovery this year.

The pair falls to the 1.2037 level, the falls 0.2% to 0.6754, while the falls 0.1% to 135.69, before the meeting on Thursday, in which expects the bank to keep interest rates at record lows.

• Do you want to diversify your portfolio with other options? Go ahead and sign up for our webinar “CFDs and Futures Guide: How to trade them successfully”: https://tinyurl.com/3nfcccrr