U.S. dollar keeps falling amid economic data

NEW YORK, Feb. 14 (Xinhua) -- U.S. dollar decreased against other major currencies on Wednesday, as investors digested the country's newly-released economic reports.

The Consumer Price Index (CPI) rose 0.5 percent in January on a seasonally adjusted basis, beating market consensus of 0.3 percent, the U.S. Labor Department said on Wednesday. Over the last 12 months, the all items index rose 2.1 percent.

Excluding the volatile food and energy components, the core consumer prices gained 0.3 percent in January, above market expectations of 0.2 percent. In the 12 months through January, the core CPI increased 1.8 percent.

Meanwhile, advance estimates of U.S. retail and food services sales for January 2018 came in at 492.0 billion U.S. dollars, a decrease of 0.3 percent from the previous month, missing market estimates of a 0.3-percent gain, the Commerce Department reported Wednesday.

"This was a downright awful report, with sales falling almost one percent short of expectations between the January miss and the December revision," said Chris Low, chief economist at FTN Financial, in a note.

The dollar index, which measures the greenback against six major peers, decreased 0.65 percent at 89.124 in late trading.

In late New York trading, the euro rose to 1.2444 dollars from 1.2363 dollars in the previous session, and the British pound climbed to 1.3995 dollars from 1.3886 U.S. dollars in the previous session. The Australian dollar gained to 0.7918 dollar from 0.7859 dollar.

The U.S. dollar bought 107.04 Japanese yen, lower than 107.68 yen of the previous session. The U.S. dollar dipped to 0.9303 Swiss franc from 0.9342 Swiss francs, and it moved down to 1.2517 Canadian dollars from 1.2594 Canadian dollars. Enditem