New Zealand GDP in the barrel with the Kiwi at July lows
New Zealand reports second-quarter growth later on Wednesday, or early on Thursday depending on where you are relative to the international date line, and the forecast is 0.1% for the quarter, down from 0.8% in the first three months of the year.
The annual figure is forecast to go the other way, to 2.3% from 1.5%, because the quarters it is measured against were weaker than the ones replacing them. So the same release will show growth stalling and growth picking up by most of a point, and both readings will be correct.
The growth figure reaches NZD/USD through the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ), which took the Official Cash Rate (OCR) to 2.75% on September 2 with inflation at 4.1% and called the economy recovering. This is the first hard number behind that. The Fed raised its own rate to 3.75%-4.00% on Wednesday and pointed to another increase, which already leaves US rates more than a point above New Zealand's.
NZD/USD trades just above 0.5700, its lowest since early July, with the session high short of 0.5800. The slide runs from the late-August high just under 0.6000 and has been a series of lower highs since. The pair sits below both its 50-day and 200-day Exponential Moving Averages (EMA), which have converged near 0.5850 and which it has not traded above since early September.
The daily Stochastic Relative Strength Index (Stoch RSI), a momentum gauge, is at the bottom of its band, where it last sat during the June sell-off that took the pair to just above 0.5600.
