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The Opening Bell: Where currencies start on Friday, December 9, 2016

Currencies
The Opening Bell: Where currencies start on Friday, December 9, 2016

By Dan Bell

The NZDUSD opens at 0.7176 (mid-rate) this morning.

The Kiwi is up across the board after the ECB announcement overnight.

European stocks rose after the ECB decision to reduce the long-running bond buying scheme to 60 billion euros a month, from 80 billion, from April to December 2017. This spooked bond and money markets on Thursday and triggered a short sharp surge in the euro.

However, initial market reaction was tempered after ECB President Mario Draghi said it was not an outright winding-down of quantitative easing (QE), as policymakers want more evidence of a sustained pickup in inflation in Europe.

The ECB decided that the interest rate on the main refinancing operations and the interest rates on the marginal lending facility and the deposit facility will remain unchanged at 0.00%, 0.25% and -0.40% respectively.

In the week ending December 3, the advance figure for U.S. seasonally adjusted initial claims was 258,000, a decrease of 10,000 from the previous week's unrevised level of 268,000.

Tonight we have Swiss Unemployment rate, German Trade Balance, UK Consumer Inflation Expectations, UK Construction output, & UK Goods Trade balance, and for the US University of Michigan Consumer Sentiment.

Global equity markets are higher with the exception of China - Dow +0.41%, S&P 500 +0.42%, FTSE +0.42%, DAX +1.75%, CAC +0.87%, Nikkei +1.45%, Shanghai -0.21%.

Gold prices are down 0.4% at $1,170 an ounce WTI Crude Oil  have rallied 1.2% currently at  $50.76 a barrel.

Current indicative rates:

NZDUSD       0.7176       0.3%
NZDEUR       0.6760       1.7%
NZDGBP       0.5704       0.6%
NZDJPY         81.95        0.6%
NZDAUD       0.9628       0.7%
NZDCAD       0.9479       0.1%

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Dan Bell is the senior currency strategist at HiFX in Auckland. You can contact him here »

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Source: CoinDesk

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