Comments from Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve, shook any end-of-week trading torpor yesterday and capped a week where speeches, rather than statistics, were once again the driver of market direction.

The dollar shared the headlines with policymakers all week as market participants pushed the greenback to new lows against an ever-broader range of currencies amid looming weekend meetings of the Asia-Pacific Economic Co-operation forum in Chile and a gathering of G20 policymakers in Germany.