90 seconds at 9 am: NZ$ lower; China property worries; Fed investigates Goldman Sachs; NZ businesses confident

Watch on our video home page here Watch on YouTube here David Chaston details the key news overnight in 90 seconds at 9am in association with BNZ, including news that the NZ$ is going to finish the month at near its low for the year, following a broad pullback by international investors from riskier commodity currencies. Standard & Poors is warning that a major property correction is coming in China and there are continuing worries about Greek debt. The US Fed is now investigating the Goldman Sachs role in masking those debt levels, and then profiting from the troubles. As one analyst said overnight, its like buying fire insurance on your neighbors property, it creates an incentive to see it burn down. There were also record low sales of new homes in January in the US, the lowest since records began in 1963, almost 50 years ago. But the international gloom is in clear contrast to New Zealand business confidence readings that show their most positive levels in ten years, spurred on by the construction sector and manufacturers. One downside in this data is that there seems to be little evidence of job growth, so we are likely to be in a period of rapidly improving productivity. January credit growth has been static, with small rises for housing and agriculture, and outright declines for consumer debt, and business borrowing It is now quite clear businesses and consumers are really focused on de-leveraging "“ that is, getting rid of the debt they built up unsustainably in the last ten years. Today we will be reporting the data for the trade balance and building consents for January, which will give us an the first indications on how the New Zealand economy is likely to develop in the first quarter of 2010.