Kiwi falls after Chinese growth misses expectations
The world's second biggest economy grew at a slower annual pace than expected in the first three months of the year.
The world's second biggest economy grew at a slower annual pace than expected in the first three months of the year.
The New Zealand dollar dropped half a US cent in local trading after Chinese figures showed the world's second biggest economy grew at a slower annual pace than expected in the first three months of the year.
The kiwi fell to 85.04 US cents at 5pm in Wellington from 85.59 cents immediately before the release, and was down from 85.67 cents at 8.30am and 85.88 cents last week. The trade-weighted index dropped to 78.14 from 78.79 last week.
China's gross domestic product grew at an annual pace of 7.7 percent in the 12 months ended March 31, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.
That was short of the 8 percent expected in a Bloomberg survey of economists, and slower than the 7.9 percent annual pace at the end of the fourth quarter.
"It's still pretty staggering growth compared to what everyone else manages to achieve, but for China the data was on the soft side of expectations," says Chris Tennent-Brown, FX economist at Commonwealth Bank of Australia in Sydney.
"It's not like a collapse [in the kiwi], rather a correction after being strong last week."
Risk-sensitive currencies including the kiwi dollar came off the boil at the end of the last week when US retail sales figures disappointed investors, and ended a four-day rally on Wall Street.
New Zealand's services sector continued to grow last month as the local property market bubbled along in the major centres of Auckland and Christchurch, according to the BNZ-BusinessNZ performance of services index.
The kiwi fell to 83.25 yen at 5pm in Wellington from 84.36 yen last week, and decreased to 81.46 Australian cents from 81.62 cents. It declined to 65.02 euro cents from 65.42 cents last week and decreased to 55.48 British pence from 5.91 pence.
(BusinessDesk)