The New Zealand dollar declined today following yesterday’s gains. While the positive news about the US-China trade conflict supported riskier commodity currencies yesterday, a big miss in some important Chinese macroeconomic indicators overshadowed the supportive fundamentals today.
The National Bureau of Statistics of China released several important macroeconomic indicators for July today. Industrial production rose 4.8%, year-on-year, slowing from 6.3% in June and missing the median forecast of a 6.0% growth. Retail sales rose 7.6%, also slowing from the previous month’s 9.8% rate of growth and trailing market expectations of an 8.6% increase. The unemployment rate edged up from 5.1% to 5.3%. The investment in fixed assets increased by 5.7% in the period from the start of the year to July compared with the same period a year ago, slowing from 5.8% in the first six months of 2019 instead of accelerating to 5.9% as analysts had predicted.
Traders were in a positive mood yesterday following the news that the United States will postpone implementations of new tariffs on Chinese goods. But today’s economic data in China soured the mood, putting markets back into the risk-off mode.
NZD/USD declined from 0.6451 to 0.6433 as of 10:36 GMT today after rising to 0.6468 yesterday. EUR/NZD gained from 1.7296 to 1.7380. NZD/JPY declined from 68.82 to 68.32.
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