If I had told yesterday that China’s quarterly GDP would beat expectations, backed up by strong growth in Industrial Production and Retail Sales, you would logically expect NZDUSD to be trading higher. After all, China is New Zealand’s second-largest trading partner behind Australia, which is itself heavily dependent on growth in the world’s largest economy. Unfortunately, this simplified analysis ignores one critical factor: the price of milk. As regular readers know, dairy products make up fully one-third of NZ exports, and today’s Global Dairy Trade (GDT) auction showed that dairy prices fell a staggering 10.7% ... (full story)