Central European Daily

The Central European currencies remained under pressure of the Ukrainian crisis on Friday morning. While the koruna erased virtually all losses later in the afternoon, the zloty and the forint closed weaker by about 0.4 % (and fell by 0.7 % and 1.2 % respectively vis-à-vis the preceding week). The forint thus ignored better than expected unemployment figures for the first quarter of 2014, which unveiled that the Hungarian labour market was in the best shape since the end of 2008. Let us recall that forint’s underperformance last week was also due to policy measures announced last Thursday (see Friday’s Daily for a thorough discussion).