The Central Bank of Sudan announced through circular (sent to Sudanese banks last Thursday) that starting from 2008 it will be denominating all currency accounting in euro instead of U.S. dollar.

The International Monetary Fund‘s report, released this Friday, shows that the specific part of U.S. dollar in world’s foreign currency reserves fell significantly in 2007.

South African national currency, rand, showed this week a highest gain against U.S. dollar since October, based on a high probability that the South African Reserve Bank will increase the benchmark interest rate again after the inflation continued to grow.

Today euro reached a new record high value against the Great Britain pound after the real estate market of the United Kingdom brought even more negative news thus increasing the chances for the Bank of England to cut the interest rate in January or February 2008.

The median U.S. dollar gain versus euro, estimated by the foreign exchange market experts for the next year, is 3.5%. The dollar is believed to gain strength in 2008 after two years of a pretty fast decline and hitting the historical minimums against several major world currencies.

Hidetoshi Kamezaki member of the Policy Board of the Bank of Japan said today during briefing with the reporters, that BoJ has no plans to lower main interest rate yet, and it will have to look at whole picture of the coming economic statistics before carrying out a decision on a rate’s change.

U.S. dollar has already entered the Christmas flat market zone and is trading on the very low volumes. During the Asian session today it managed to lose just 0.1% to Japanese yen as the latter gained from the good news from Merrill Lynch.

The euro rose against all other major currencies today spurred by the carry trading optimism and weakness experienced by the Great Britain pound and the U.S. dollar.

South African rand has fallen this week losing almost 2% against the U.S. dollar compared to its last Friday’s close rate. It was the second straight loss week for USD/ZAR as the Forex traders were leaving carry trade positions before the holidays period uncertainty and on the bad political background in South Africa.

Indian Finance Minister, Palaniappan Chidambaram,  said yesterday that the the rupee’s value is determined only by the market participants and is not regulated by the government in any way.