The Hungarian forint strengthened a bit further after the good current account data, released yesterday. The EUR/HUF pair dropped to 265.80 from 267.00 after the data release because Hungary’s current account surplus came in higher at above €2bn or 2% of GDP for 2010. The country’s overall financing capacity improved close to 4% of GDP due to hefty inflow from EU funds. It seems that households’ cautious behaviour helped the current account to improve further last year, which will be a strong base for this year, when we expect some deterioration due to the tax cut of personal income taxes.
The Polish zloty decoupled from the koruna and the forint and weakened yesterday. The reason for underperformance of the Polish currency might be uncertainty surrounding the balance-of-payments statistics. Although the quarterly results, which were revealed yesterday, showed that Poland recorded C/A deficit of 3.4 % of GDP, the market wonders what will happen with and omissions in the balance-of-payments, which stood at around 4% of GDP. We are (and the market too) afraid that these discrepancies will lead to upward revisions in previous C/A deficits, which could imply negative revisions of nominal GDP in previous years (so all ratios calculated against GDP will deteriorate).