The U.S. dollar was seen trading mixed on the week amid a rather slow week as far as economic data was concerned.

The main highlight of the week was that the U.S. and the EU agreed on trade negotiations.

This briefly quelled nerves of escalating trade wars. On Friday, the U.S. GDP report showed that the U.S. economy rose at the fastest pace since Q3 of 2014.

In the Eurozone, the ECB held its monetary policy meeting last week.

No changes were made to interest rates as the central bank maintained its forward guidance from the June ECB meeting.

U.S. preliminary Q2 GDP rises 4.1%

The U.S. economy was seen posting strong gains in the second quarter as widely anticipated.

Data from the U.S. department of commerce showed that the economy advanced at a pace of 4.1% on an annualized basis in the three months ending June 2018.

The gains in the economy came amid higher consumer spending and higher amount of exports of soybeans and other agricultural products.

The acceleration in soybean exports came ahead of the July deadline when China slapped the U.S. in retaliatory tariffs.

The gains were also partly offset by a smaller decrease in fixed residential investment and in the housing sector.

Investment in the housing sector fell for the second straight quarter.

The gains in the GDP for the second quarter was the highest since the third quarter of 2014.

Despite a better than expected GDP report, economists caution that growth could slow into the third quarter on the back of the trade tariffs that was slapped by the U.S. administration across its trading partners.

The commerce department also released its core personal expenditure data.

A closely followed report by the Fed and used a guage of inflation, the data showed that excluding food and energy prices, core PCE advanced 2.0% in the second quarter.

This was down from 2.2% gain that was seen in the first quarter.

ECB keeps monetary policy unchanged

The European Central Bank held its monetary policy meeting last week on Thursday.

As widely expected, policymakers at the central bank held the key interest rate unchanged at -0.40%.

The central bank also left the monthly bond purchases steady at 30 billion euros. The meeting was uneventful overall.

The ECB’s meeting was broadly in line with the market expectations.

This was because the central bank had in June announced that it would taper its bond purchasees by half starting from September.

This would bring the final leg of the bond purchases to 15 billion euro.

The central bank had also announced that it would end its QE by Decemberr 2018.

At the press conference, the ECB president Mario Draghi said that interest rates will remain unchanged despite the QE ending this year.

He repeated the same statement from the previous press conference.

However, the euro currency fell sharply on the day following the ECB’s press conference.

Consumer prices in Australia rises 2.1% in Q2

The latest inflation figures for the second quarter from Australia showed that consumer prices increased at a subdued pace.

Data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed that headline inflation rose 0.4% on the quarter ending June 2018.

This was below the expectations of a 0.5% increase and unchanged from the first quarter’s print of 0.4%.

On a yearly basis, headline inflation in Australia was seen rising 2.1% for year ending June 2018.

This was slightly below estimates of a 2.2% increase but consumer prices were seen rising 1.9% from the previous three months.

Another measure of inflation, the trimmed mean CPI increased 0.5% on the quarter pushing the annual trimmed mean CPI to 1.9% on the year.

The data matched the median estimates.

The second quarter inflation report is expectd to see the RBA continuing to remain on the sidelines, although inflation is seen slowing rising closer to the 2.5% mid-range of the inflation target band set by the Reserve Bank of Australia.