Today is a very exciting day in the financial markets, with many important events and some reports coming in a day early due to tomorrow’s celebration of Thanksgiving in the United States.
The first key event of the day was the monthly monetary policy meeting of the Reserve Bank of New Zealand. As expected, the RBNZ took a hawkish turn and raised interest rates by 25 basis points, up to 0.75% currently.
This rate hike was no surprise, considering the good performance of the New Zealand economy and the spikes in inflation in recent months. After all, the goal of all central banks will be to gradually recover to a 2% interest rate once the pandemic is over. Some, like the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and the Bank of Canada are closer than others.
Furthermore, Germany published the Ifo business confidence index for November, which narrowly missed the forecast at 96.5.
There is also a huge data dump out of the United States today because of the markets staying closed for Thanksgiving tomorrow. First of these came the durable goods orders for October and the GDP growth rate in the third quarter, both of which disappointed investors.
The US then published its weekly update on jobless claims, where initial jobless claims dropped to their lowest since the start of the pandemic (199K), but continuing claims increased this week.
There’s more: the core PCE and all-around PCE price indices both met the forecasts, coming in at 4.1% and 5%, respectively.
In addition, the Michigan consumer sentiment survey for November was better than expected at 67.4.
Later today we would also get the minutes from the latest meeting of the Federal Reserve. It will most likely contain details about the precise timeline for unwinding bond purchases.
In other news, Germany might finally have a government. After weeks of negotiations, a coalition was agreed between the Social Democratic Party, the Free Democrats, and the Greens. The next Chancellor of Germany will be Olaf Scholz of the SDP.
