What crisis? NZ stockmarket soars, now close to where it started the year

Shares soar: The New York Stock Exchange on Friday, June 5, 2020. AP Photo.

It might be safe to look at your KiwiSaver account again.

The local NZX-50 has surged by more than 2.3 per cent today - bringing its fall for the year back to just 1.5 per ent.

The New Zealand market has followed Wall Street's lead, staging a recovery that seems to look completely through the economic damage of Covid-19.

US markets and New Zealand's NZX-50 fell about 30 per cent as the world went into lockdown in late March.

Since then they have rebounded dramatically, with the US S&P500 and the NZX now up 38 and 33 per cent respectively since their low points in March.

This today's rise follows a big spike on Wall Street on Friday, after US job numbers came in much stronger than expected.

Most economists had anticipated the May data to show huge job losses but instead it showed employers actually added 2.5 million jobs last month.

That was the most jobs created in a one-month period. The unemployment rate dropped to 13.3 per cent.

Stocks soared on the news, sending the Dow Jones up 3.15 per cent.

The Nasdaq Composite hit an intra-day all-time high before settling for 2.06 per cent. The S&P 500 gained 2.6 per cent.

Oil prices also continued to surge back from record lows this year, adding to market optimism about the global economy.

Another agreement by OPEC and its partners to cut production saw the price of West Texas and Brent Crude rise by more than 5 per cent.

Having technically traded in negative territory the price of US benchmark West Texas Crude is now back near US$40 a barrel.

In the US, the markets have a big tech focus with stocks like Amazon and Netflix doing particularly well and lifting the Nasdaq index by 40 per cent from it's March low, and close to its all-time high.

In New Zealand, the strong performance of market darlings a2 Milk and F&P healthcare have contributed to the strong rebound.

While markets have thus far been largely unrattled by protest and political turmoil in the US, the threat of a second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic remains real.

That has divided market analysts, with many saying investors are taking an overly optimistic approach.

But enormous levels of stimulus have underpinned the market performance and record low interest rates have deterred investors from placing their money more conservatively.

In New Zealand, we have seen about $60 billion of fiscal stimulus from the Government and $60 billion of monetary policy stimulus from the Reserve Bank.

The US has had about US$2.7 trillion of fiscal stimulus and monetary stimulus of $5.6 trillion.