The Australian Dollar may experience a relatively stable day of trading today after the massive movements we saw last week with a lack of high tiered local data out today to shake the markets.
Friday saw the release of the much anticipated US Labour Market data, the last key indicator analysts have been waiting for to provide insight in to the possibility that the US Federal Reverse will raise the official cash rate this month when they meet on the 16th December.
US jobs data showed a decent rise in the number of people with jobs in the world’s largest economy. Westpac’s Imre Speizer said the US non-farm payrolls report for November beat expectations, ‘The US payrolls report was stronger than expected, sealing a strong case for the (Federal Reserve) to hike on 16 December,’ ‘Payrolls rose 211k, along with very healthy upward revisions to the last two months of +35k. Household employment backed the establishment data showing a 244k gain. Encouragingly the labour force grew 273k though hourly earning were more moderate at +0.16 per cent.’
The release of this data didn’t have a significant impact on the Australian Dollar to US Dollar (AUD/USD) Exchange Rate which is currently still trading close to a 3 month high at 0.7338.
There are a number of medium and minor economic indicators that will be released locally this week. Today the Australian economy will report on AIG Construction Index and ANZ Job Advertisements. Tomorrow will see the release NAB Business Confidence and Thursday Australia will release the latest Employment figures.
The key focus for the week will be the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) and the Bank of England (BoE) both of which have their respective Cash Rate decisions and Monetary Policy Statements.
The Forecast for the RBNZ is for a rate reduction of 25 basis points from 2.75% to 2.50%. Dairy pricing last week saw a positive improvement with a result of 3.6% increase in the average price of dairy sold at auction which provided the ‘Kiwi’ with some gains against the ‘Aussie’ to close the week. Today the Australian Dollar to New Zealand Dollar Exchange Rate is trading at 1.0885 at 8:30 AM AEST.