British pound on the rise as politicking continues in London

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The British pound eked out an advance against the U.S. dollar Thursday, as the London politicking around an alternative Brexit plan continues.

The Brexit-sensitive British pound














GBPUSD, +0.7299%












 fetched $1.2957, up 0.6% from Wednesday, benefitting from no outright bad news on the Brexit front in the day so far.

U.K. Prime Minister Theresa May was holding cross-party Brexit talks but had not raised delaying the exit date beyond March 29 with Brussels so far, a spokesperson of the prime minister said, according to reports. Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn allegedly boycotted the talks, local press reported, and later tweeted a letter he had written to May, demanding that a no-deal Brexit had to be ruled out before talk began. May responded with a letter of her own, expressing her disappointment in Corbyn and saying that everyone else had come to the table.

May’s government on Wednesday narrowly survived a vote of no-confidence brought by the Labor party a day after the premier’s Brexit deal was voted down in a landslide by parliamentarians on Tuesday.

Check out: What is a no-confidence vote?

Read: 3 reasons why investors outside of the U.K. should care about Brexit

The government has until Monday to offer up an alternative deal, with parliament to provide time to debate and vote on next steps on Brexit on Jan. 29. The government published a paper on Thursday, saying a second Brexit referendum would take more than a year to organize, according to local reports.

Elsewhere, the U.S. dollar and its main rival, the euro, remained rather range-bound, as traders awaited fresh drivers. The ICE U.S. Dollar Index














DXY, -0.04%












 edged up 0.1% to 96.110, while the euro














EURUSD, +0.0000%












 was down to the same extent, buying $1.1386.

The Japanese yen














USDJPY, -0.05%












 meanwhile strengthened some against the greenback, with one dollar buying ¥109.03 of the safe-haven currency, down 0.1%.

The thematic backdrop was largely the same on Thursday as earlier in the week. Dollar traders were focusing on news about trade relations and the partial government shutdown, now on day 27. In economic data, jobless claims fell in the latest week, but revealed that more furloughed federal workers were collecting benefits. Meanwhile, a measure of the Philadelphia-area economy recovered sharply in early January.

Read: Why stock-market investors are starting to worry about the government shutdown

In other European news, the final reading of December consumer price inflation in the eurozone came in at the lowest level since April, at 1.6%. All this comes just one week ahead of the European Central Bank’s first meeting of 2019 and shortly after ECB President Mario Draghi said that economic developments were weaker than expected.

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Source : MTV