Dollar bears to remain on sidelines until U.S. economy runs out of steam: Goldman

Investing.com -- The dollar was little changed Monday after snapping a three-week win streak last week, but a surprisingly strong U.S. economy suggests it is too early to bet the bears may soon resume their grip on the greenback, Goldman Sachs said.

The U.S. dollar index, which measures the greenback against a trade-weighted basket of six major currencies, was flat at 103.96.

The trend of a stronger U.S. economy and a weakness in Europe and China continues to be positive for the dollar in the near term, according to Goldman Sachs. This pattern will have to "abate before medium-term shallow dollar depreciation can come back into view," it added.

The remarks arrived just after the U.S. economy produced a blowout monthly jobs report, released Friday, in keeping with a trend seen over the better part of a year, Goldman Sachs says, showing that "hard data have been consistently stronger than expected in the U.S. while soft survey data have generally been weaker than expected." 

The strong data hasn't gone unnoticed at the Federal Reserve, meanwhile, where Fed officials have had to acknowledge the resilience of the economy by shifting language to a "skip" rather than a pause of rate hikes. 

About 75% of traders expect the Fed to skip rate hikes at its next meeting later this month with about 50% expecting the central bank to resume rate hikes in July, according to Investing.com's Fed Rate Monitor Tool.

Some on Wall Street, however, believe that a skip in June paves the way for an extended pause for the rest of the year.

"We expect the Chair's [Jerome Powell's] press conference to be heavily focused on communicating that the Fed will be on hold for an extended period of time," Morgan Stanley said in a Monday note.

If the Fed, however, does stick with skipping that would support investor sentiment on risk assets and could threaten the safe-haven dollar, but "we suspect that downside will continue to be shallow and limited by U.S. macro performance,"   Goldman Sachs said.