KUALA LUMPUR, July 29 — The ringgit continued to depreciate against the US dollar today despite higher crude oil prices, as the slight fall in the daily Covid-19 cases in Malaysia was not enough to revive positivity in the market, an analyst said.
At 6pm, the local note fell to 4.2360/2410 versus the greenback from Wednesday’s close of 4.2330/2355.
The daily Covid-19 cases in Malaysia has exceeded 17,000 for the second consecutive day with 17,170 new cases reported today, bringing the cumulative number of cases to 1,078,646.
Bank Islam Malaysia Bhd economist Adam Mohamed Rahim said the market movement was also influenced by the United States (US) Federal Reserve (Fed) meeting, which indicated that the labour market still had some ground to cover before it would be time to pull back emergency economic support measures.
“Labour market still requires some time to recover especially in the wake of the highly infectious Delta variant before it would be appropriate for the Fed to begin tightening its monetary policy stance,” he told Bernama.
He said this somewhat indicated that the Fed was wary of the potential impacts from the highly infectious variant, which could possibly lead to an uneven path of recovery.
“As such, sentiment towards other currencies including the ringgit was dampened in light of an uneven path to economic recovery,” he said.
Meanwhile, the local note was traded lower against a basket of major currencies.
The ringgit fell against the euro to 5.0294/0353 from yesterday’s close of 5.0017/0047 and depreciated versus the Japanese yen to 3.8562/8611 from 3.8489/8515.
The local unit weakened vis-a-vis the British pound to 5.9092/9162 from 5.8733/8768 and shrank against the Singapore dollar to 3.1285/1324 from 3.1141/1162 yesterday. — Bernama
