By Gina Lee
Investing.com -– The U.S dollar rose in Asia on Thursday as investors continued to look for safe havens.
The U.S. dollar index, which tracks the greenback against a basket of other currencies, rose 0.01% to 99.761 by 11:16 AM ET (4:16 AM GMT).
U.S President Donald Trump warned Americans to brace for a "rough two weeks” overnight as the World Health Organization said that the number of global COVID-19 cases topped 800,000 as of April 1.
Data prepared by Investing.com predicts that another 3.5 million Americans filed for unemployment benefits as the U.S. announces its weekly initial jobless claims later today.
“If America’s optimistic president is warning the worst of the pandemic is yet to come, what factory in their right mind would keep the doors open and workers on the payroll?” Chris Rupkey, chief financial economist at MUFG Union Bank, asked in a CNBC interview.
“With only a few actual data points so far, the results indicate this is looking more like a depression than a garden-variety recession,” he added.
The USD/JPY pair was down 0.33% to 107.5.
“As we’ve seen yesterday, a deterioration in the U.S. economic outlook is likely to lead to strength in the yen against the U.S. dollar,” Shin-ichiro Kadota, senior strategist at Barclays (LON:BARC), said to CNBC.