The New Zealands currency continued its extremely fast drop against the other major currencies today after the retail sales report was released yesterday at 22:45 GMT.
It was a third day of a bearish trend for the New Zealand dollar (at least against the U.S. dollar) as it continued the fall thats lasting from mid March 2008 when kiwi (a nickname for NZD) reached its historical maximum against the greenback.
While the Australian dollar is still standing strong, especially against euro and pound, its «buddy-currency» is heading directly down. Many currency analysts are starting to talk about AUD and NZD decoupling that may be caused by the commodities boom, which are largely present in Australian economy and are insignificant in the New Zealand economy.
Retail sales fell 1.2 percent in New Zealand in March the same value retail sales dropped in Q1 2008. They decreased 1.5% per head of population last quarter. Analysts expected only a minor fall in sales, so the reported values caused more bearish positions against the New Zealand dollar.
NZD/USD opened at 0.7613 today and declined to 0.7563 as of 8:50 GMT. During the same period NZD/JPY, one of the locomotives of the carry trade, fell from 79.89 to 79.27 on Forex.
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