* Rand near bottom of EM currency basket
* Govt bonds follow suit, yields off record lows
JOHANNESBURG, July 6 (Reuters) – South Africa’s rand fell as
much as 1.75 percent to a 7-day trough against the dollar on
Friday as weaker-than-expected U.S. jobs numbers hit global risk
sentiment, sending investors scurrying to safe haven assets.
Government bonds moved in tandem, snapping three days of
gains with yields pulling back from recent historic lows.
The rand hit a session low of 8.2873 to the
greenback, its softest level since June 29, and was down 1.47
percent at 8.2650 by 1533 GMT compared with Thursday’s close at
8.1450.
“We’re just following the euro. People had put euro selling
on hold while we waited for the U.S. non-farms, but the euro’s
been moving steadily lower since then,” RMB rand trader Jim
Bryson said.
“We gained earlier this week on the whole risk-on scenario,
we’re now suffering somewhat from the risk-off scenario. But the
rand’s still very much in ranges, we’re not breaking levels at
which we are going to enter the weekend dramatically.”
The rand, highly vulnerable to global volatility because of
the very liquid nature of local markets, has wiped out most of
this week’s earlier gains that had taken it to 7-week highs
against the greenback.
It was sitting near the bottom of a basket of 20 emerging
market currencies tracked by Reuters on Friday, outperforming
only the Polish zloty and the Hungarian forint.
Continued…
