Coronavirus is a dark cloud over antipodeans currencies that are otherwise enjoying some recent weakness in the greenback owing to the central bank convergences.
The Federal reserve hawkish rhetoric has been dialled down a touch since Friday's speech by the Fed's chair Jerome Powell.
Both the Kiwi and Aussie have risen in a decisive correction on the charts with the kiwi coming up as the highest performer due to the hawkish Reserve Bank of New Zealand:
Additionally, Australia's epidemic is most prominent currently and Australia's Victoria state premier says it is too early to open up from coronavirus lockdown.
Australia is now seeing its worst-case numbers since the pandemic began.
The nation has recently recorded its 1,000th death from the pandemic, as it struggles to contain Delta variant outbreaks.
''On Monday, New South Wales state – of which Sydney is capital – reported four new deaths and another daily record of 1,218 cases.
Authorities warned that death and hospitalisation rates would increase into October, even as more people got vaccinated,'' the BC recently wrote in an article online.
As for New Zealand, the emergence of the Delta variant of COVID-19 in the community has brought New Zealand’s incredible economic recovery to a swift (and we hope temporary) stop, analysts at ANZ Bank explained.
More key notes from ANZ:
''Lockdown comes with costs, and we assume that production GDP will fall 6% in Q3. However, if the last Level 4 lockdown taught us anything, it’s that the headline drop in GDP, while still a significant hit, is a poor indicator of the strength of the recovery on the other side.''
''Rather, it’s the health and fiscal responses that shelter us from the worst effects – and they have both swung into action since lockdown was announced. So we remain hopeful that the economy will rebound from lockdown.''
''But the Delta variant is a persistent foe, so we’ll be watching the case numbers closely. Overall, the outlook for monetary policy is relatively unchanged under our assumptions that the outbreak is controlled and the economy bounces back swiftly.''
''While the OCR was unchanged in August, the RBNZ has made it clear that a hike was planned. There’s a lot that has to go right for the RBNZ to be able to hike the OCR as they plan – but barring some unforeseeable catastrophe, we expect those hikes will commence in October.''
AUD/USD analysis
Longer-term, AUD/USD is attempting to stabilise on USD weakness as follows:
