Forex Marketz Daily Forex News – Fully Markets Update
This morning, New Zealand released retail sales data. This supported the Kiwi dollar and the NZD/USD Forex market. The Kiwi is also finding some relief as the bellicose and belligerent rhetoric between the United States, namely US President Donald Trump, and North Korea has calmed down a bit. Still, the rogue North Korean regime is threatening the US territory of Guam with a ballistic missile strike.
In economic data, released by New Zealand, earlier during the Asian trade hours Monday morning, better than expected retail sales numbers increased sentiment of a rate hike by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. This supported the Kiwi dollar.
Official data showed that in the second quarter of 2017, the total volume of store transactions rose a better than expected two percent.
This was the strongest retail sales print since the second quarter of 2016. This number found support by a record 4.2 percent increase in the food and beverage sales. According to Statistics New Zealand, this was largely due to the influx of sports fans and tourism for the World Masters Games as wells as the Lions rugby tour.
The Kiwi finds support from RBNZ Comments
Last week, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand stated, in a number of official speeches, that the next RBNZ interest rate move, with the official cash rate (OCR) will likely be a hike. This is likely to occur around the third quarter of 2019. With that forecast being quite some time ahead of that, the Forex markets likely interpreted today’s data leading the RBNZ to maybe acting sooner. As a result of these new expectations, local front-end bond yields rose supporting the local currency unit.
