US employment figures will be the main focus for investors in the first full week of trading in 2025, with analysts expecting robust growth in the nation’s labour market.
Non-farm payrolls are expected to report 150,000 jobs were added to the world’s biggest economy in November, with an unemployment rate of 4.2%.
The jobs report has been volatile in recent months, and investors are monitoring the strength of the US economy with the incoming Donald Trump presidency seen as adding inflationary pressure and slowing the pace of interest rate cuts by the Federal Reserve.
The kiwi dollar traded at 56.13 US cents at 7am in Auckland from 56.06 cents at 5pm on Friday.
Wall Street rallied on Friday with tech stocks including Super Micro Computer, Tesla and Palantir among those leading gainers, with the benchmark indices snapping a five-day decline.
United Airlines said on Sunday in the US that it will bring forward inflight connectivity over Elon Musk’s Starlink satellite internet service, with testing to start next month and a fully-enabled plane hooked up by the end of the year.
Traffic control
Satellite launch sites are getting increasingly congested, according to a report in The Wall Street Journal, even as the likes of Musk’s SpaceX plan to accelerate launches in the coming years.
Rocket Lab, which has launch operations on New Zealand’s Māhia Peninsula, surged 15% to US$28.74 on Friday.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s Foxconn beat analyst expectations with a record fourth-quarter revenue as demand for artificial intelligence servers bolstered sales for the world’s biggest contract electronics maker.
US Steel fell on Friday after US President Joe Biden blocked Japan’s Nippon Steel from buying the American manufacturer.
Separately, Biden’s administration approved Perpetua Resources’ proposed antimony and gold mine in Idaho, providing a domestic source of antimony, a critical mineral for some weapons, solar panels and other goods. China blocked exports of the mineral to the US last month as tensions between the nations remain heightened.
Helping hand
On Saturday, the People’s Bank of China said it will boost support for technology innovation to bolster the economy, and that it will also look at institutional arrangements to support capital markets.
There’s little local data on the calendar this week with many New Zealand offices still operating on skeleton staffs for the summer holiday, while across the Tasman, inflation figures for November are due on Wednesday and November retail sales are due on Thursday. The kiwi dollar traded at 90.30 Australian cents from 90.21 cents last week.
New Zealand’s S&P/NZX 50 index petered out through the new year period, falling 1% across the holiday affected week, and Australia’s ASX/S&P 200 index slipped 0.1%. Australian futures are pointing to a 0.3% increase across the Tasman today.
Reporting by Paul McBeth. Image from The Jopwell Collection on Unsplash.
