Dollar inches up, stocks flat to lower before Fed

By Caroline Valetkevitch

NEW YORK (Reuters) - The dollar edged up and world stock indexes edged lower on Wednesday as investor focus turned toward the Federal Reserve, which will deliver a post-meeting statement later in the day.

Worries that Greece's new government is heading for clashes with the rest of the euro zone over its debts weighed on European shares, while shares of Apple, which jumped 6.6 percent, helped support U.S. stocks.

Apple grabbed headlines overnight after reporting the biggest quarterly profits in corporate history. Shares of Boeing also jumped 5.6 percent after the release of its results.

Investor scepticism is growing that the Fed will raise U.S. interest rates by mid-year, as had been expected. Other major central banks are easing aggressively while a strong dollar and slumping oil prices are driving down inflation and hurting profits for some U.S. multinationals.

After the Fed's first two-day meeting of 2015, policymakers may likely restate their "patient" approach to raising rates while voicing faith the U.S. economy will continue improving.

"People will be looking at the 'patient' language. I can't imagine it will be changed," said Ian Lyngen, senior government bond strategist at CRT in Stamford, Connecticut.

MSCI's global share index and an index of European shares were both off 0.2 percent.

The Dow Jones industrial average was up 13.36 points, or 0.08 percent, to 17,400.57, the S&P 500 lost 0.65 points, or 0.03 percent, to 2,028.9 and the Nasdaq Composite added 10.05 points, or 0.21 percent, to 4,691.55.

Prices on benchmark 10-year U.S. Treasury notes were up 10/32 with the yield at 1.7939 percent, according to Thomson Reuters data. Shorter maturities were little changed.

The Singapore dollar skidded to its weakest in nearly 4-1/2 years after the country's central bank eased monetary policy unexpectedly, its first unscheduled change in over a decade, ahead of a planned April meeting.

Singapore's central bank joins a growing list of counterparts from Denmark and Canada to Turkey and India which have made surprise moves in what is looking increasingly like a global currency war.

Oil prices slipped after news U.S. stockpiles surged by nearly 13 million barrels last week. Brent crude oil dipped 0.5 percent to $49.33 a barrel and U.S. crude futures slipped 2 percent to $45.30.

(Additional reporting by Marc Jones in London and Michael Connor in New York; Editing by James Dalgleish)