US Jobs Data Comes in Better Than Expected

The AUDUSD opens up at 0.6969 and the NZDUSD opens up at 0.6503.

It was all about US jobs data very early Saturday morning, with the US Unemployment Rate coming in at 13.3%; much better than expectations of 19.4%. To put it into perspective, instead of losing 7.7m jobs, they gained 2.5m. You have a feeling next month's figures will be slightly worse, after you take into account the economic forecasters that have been fired…

In other good news, the NASDAQ has made a record high. We may have missed the lecture about the positive correlation between pandemics, unemployment and stocks, but it looks like no one else did. Central Banks responded very quickly and aggressively to the pandemic, but now there is chatter that they may have gone slightly too aggressively. Thursday morning's Fed Statement now becomes very interesting. Will they start to hint at walking back their ultra-expansionary policies? If they do, you can expect the USD to recover some lost ground on the back of it.

Closer to home, most of Australia is off for the Queen’s Birthday holiday. New Zealand finds out if it moves down to “level 1” today, which is basically, restriction free domestically. If so, New Zealand will move to becoming one of the least restricted countries in the world, albeit with borders still closed. This should be another driver to help keep the Kiwi flying.

Global equity markets are up strongly- Dow +3.2%, S&P 500 +2.6%, FTSE +2.3%, DAX +3.4%, CAC +3.7%, Nikkei +0.7%, Shanghai +0.4%

Gold prices are off 1.9% to USD$1,684 an ounce, while WTI Crude Oil prices are up +5.61% to US$39 per barrel.

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