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22 Feb 2016
NZD/USD: Neutral bias for the week ahead - Westpac
Imre Speizer, Senior Market Strategist at Westpac, suggests that with NZD/USD remaining stuck in its multi-week range of 0.6550- 0.6700 and near term momentum pointing sideways, we adopt a neutral bias for the week ahead.
Key Quotes
“Further out, we stick with our expectation that NZD/USD will fall to 0.6200 over the next few months. The market is gradually pricing in more RBNZ easing - rightly so in our view. Dairy prices are likely to remain soft, and the US dollar should continue to benefit from better economic data.
The NZ data calendar should hold only minor interest for markets this week. There’s credit card spending (Mon), migration (Thu) and the Jan trade balance (Fri). The next major event is not until the RBNZ meeting on 10 March, although we do get a business confidence reading and a dairy auction before then.
3 months: We expect NZD/USD to be lower by mid-2016, targeting 0.62. Our main argument is that the Fed should raise US interest rates further this year but markets have priced in no hike until 2017. We expect US data momentum to positively surprise markets, pushing US interest rates and the USD higher. In contrast, the RBNZ should ease twice this year, but markets have fully priced in only one cut.
1 year: Our 1 year ahead forecast is 0.61, based partly on the OCR being cut by another 50bp to 2.0% and the Fed rate to rise further from 0.375% this year.”
Key Quotes
“Further out, we stick with our expectation that NZD/USD will fall to 0.6200 over the next few months. The market is gradually pricing in more RBNZ easing - rightly so in our view. Dairy prices are likely to remain soft, and the US dollar should continue to benefit from better economic data.
The NZ data calendar should hold only minor interest for markets this week. There’s credit card spending (Mon), migration (Thu) and the Jan trade balance (Fri). The next major event is not until the RBNZ meeting on 10 March, although we do get a business confidence reading and a dairy auction before then.
3 months: We expect NZD/USD to be lower by mid-2016, targeting 0.62. Our main argument is that the Fed should raise US interest rates further this year but markets have priced in no hike until 2017. We expect US data momentum to positively surprise markets, pushing US interest rates and the USD higher. In contrast, the RBNZ should ease twice this year, but markets have fully priced in only one cut.
1 year: Our 1 year ahead forecast is 0.61, based partly on the OCR being cut by another 50bp to 2.0% and the Fed rate to rise further from 0.375% this year.”