Here's my summary of the key news overnight in 90 seconds at 9 am, including news New Zealand is becoming an IMF favourite.
But first, US Federal Reserve board members were unanimous in wanting to ditch the thresholds they had been using to telegraph a policy tightening, according to minutes of last month's meeting.
Those minutes shed little new light on what might prompt an interest-rate rise, however, so perhaps US rate rises are not as close as markets had expected.
Equities took off higher on the news. Oil and gold rose. The UST 10 year benchmark yield was up but only back to 2.71%.
Greece, who was at risk of crashing out of the euro zone just two years ago, will issue its first sovereign bonds in almost four years later tonight. They are trying to send a strong political and economic signal it is on the way out of its debt crisis.
In China, there was a sign of how committed they are to bringing in new financial market reforms. The PBoC has hired Deutsche Bank's top China economist as its own chief economist, and he says he has a three year roadmap to make it more like the US Fed. There will be a lot of internal opposition to overcome first, I would think.
In a new report released overnight by the IMF, New Zealand is far and away in the best shape of the 25 advanced nations surveyed for the gross public financing needs over the next three years (see table 1.5).
The IMF says we will have the biggest surplus by 2016 and the least need for new debt (on a % of GDP basis).
The NZ Dollar flirted with 87 USc late yesterday and fell back slightly overnight. But it pushed on up again when the US Fed minutes were released and is now at 86.8 USc, the Aussie is at 92.7 AUc, and the TWI is now at 80.5, all similar levels to where they were at this time yesterday morning.
If you want to catch up with all the changes yesterday, we have an update here.
The easiest place to stay up with today's event risk is by following our Economic Calendar here »
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