The NZD/USD pair held steady on Wednesday morning as investors reacted to the latest New Zealand jobs numbers. The pair is trading at 0.6647, which is significantly higher than last week’s low of 0.6530.
New Zealand jobs numbers
The New Zealand economy is doing relatively well even amid the Covid-19 pandemic continues. On Wednesday, the country’s statistics agency published strong jobs numbers. The data revealed that the unemployment rate declined from 3.3% to 3.2% in the fourth quarter.
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This drop was better than the median estimate of 3.4%. The reading implies that the economy has already moved back to pre-pandemic levels even as New Zealand remains closed to the outside world.
Additional data showed that the New Zealand participation rate declined slightly from 71.20% to 71.10% in Q4. That drop was worse than the median estimate of 71.20% and was mostly because of the lockdown that the country implemented during the quarter.
Meanwhile, New Zealand’s labour cost index rose by 2.8% in Q4 while the employment change rose by 0.1% on a quarter-on-quarter basis.
These numbers came a day after the same agency published strong New Zealand trade numbers. The country’s exports rose sharply to about $6 billion in December while imports retreated modestly.
The next big catalyst for the NZD/USD pair will be the upcoming interest rate decision by the Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ). The bank, which will meet on February 23rd, is expected to sound a bit hawkish in its bid to slow inflation. Analysts believe that it will hike interest rates by about 25 basis points.
Later on Wednesday, the NZD/USD pair will react to the latest jobs numbers from the United States. Analysts expect that the ADP figure will show that the economy added about 201k jobs.
NZD/USD forecast
The four-hour chart shows that the NZD/USD pair has been in a bullish trend in the past few days. The pair has already jumped by about 1.72% from the lowest level last week. Along the way, it has moved slightly above the 23.6% Fibonacci retracement level. The NZDUSD pair has also moved to the upper side of the Bollinger Bands while the Relative Strength Index (RSI) has tilted higher. Therefore, there is a likelihood that the pair will continue with the bullish trend.
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Source: https://invezz.com/news/2022/02/02/nzd-usd-forecast-what-next-after-the-mixed-nz-jobs-data/