New Zealand - P-185b - 5 New Zealand Dollar - Foreign Paper Money

5 Dollars, P-185b.

The New Zealand dollar (Māori: tāra o Aotearoa; sign: $, NZ$; code: NZD) is the official currency and legal tender of New Zealand, the Cook Islands, Niue, the Ross Dependency, Tokelau, and a British territory, the Pitcairn Islands. Within New Zealand, it is almost always abbreviated with the dollar sign ($), with "NZ$" sometimes used to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies.

Introduced in 1967, the dollar is subdivided into 100 cents. Altogether it has five coins and five banknotes with the smallest being the 10-cent coin; smaller denominations have been discontinued due to inflation and production costs.

In the context of currency trading, the New Zealand dollar is sometimes informally called the "Kiwi" or "Kiwi dollar", since the flightless bird, the kiwi, is depicted on its one-dollar coin. It is the tenth most traded currency in the world, representing 2.1% of global foreign exchange market daily turnover in 2019.

Prior to the introduction of the New Zealand dollar in 1967, the New Zealand pound was the currency of New Zealand, which had been distinct from the pound sterling since 1933. The pound used the £sd system, in which the pound was divided into 20 shillings and one shilling was divided into 12 pence, a system which by the 1950s was considered complicated and cumbersome.

Switching to decimal currency had been proposed in New Zealand since the 1930s, although only in the 1950s did any plans come to fruition. In 1957, a committee was set up by the Government to investigate decimal currency. The idea fell on fertile ground, and in 1963, the Government decided to decimalise New Zealand currency. The Decimal Currency Act was passed in 1964, setting the date of transition to 10 July 1967. Words such as "fern", "kiwi" and "zeal" were proposed to avoid confusion with the word "dollar", which many people associate with the United States dollar. In the end, the word "dollar" was chosen anyway, and an anthropomorphic dollar note cartoon character called "Mr. Dollar" became the symbol of transition in a huge publicity campaign.

On Monday 10 July 1967 ("Decimal Currency Day"), the New Zealand dollar was introduced to replace the pound at a rate of two dollars to one pound (one dollar to ten shillings, ten cents to one shilling, 5⁄6 cent to a penny). Some 27 million new banknotes were printed and 165 million new coins were minted for the changeover.

The New Zealand dollar was initially pegged to both the British pound sterling and the United States dollar at NZ$1 = UK£1⁄2 = US$1.40. On 21 November 1967 sterling was devalued from UK£1 = US$2.80 to US$2.40 (see Bretton Woods system), but the New Zealand dollar was devalued even more from NZ$1 = US$1.40 to US$1.12, to match the value of the Australian dollar.

In 1971 the US devalued its dollar relative to gold, leading New Zealand on 23 December to peg its dollar at US$1.216 with a 4.5% fluctuation range, keeping the same gold value. From 9 July 1973 to 4 March 1985 the dollar's value was determined from a trade-weighted basket of currencies.

On 4 March 1985, the NZ$ was floated at the initial rate of US$0.4444. Since then the dollar's value has been determined by the financial markets, and has been in the range of about US$0.39 to 0.88.

The dollar's post-float low was US$0.3922 on 22 November 2000, and it reached a post-float high on 9 July 2014 of US$0.8821. Much of this medium-term variation in the exchange rate has been attributed to differences in interest rates.

The New Zealand dollar is among the 10 most-traded currencies.

On 11 June 2007 the Reserve Bank sold an unknown worth of New Zealand dollars for nine billion USD in an attempt to drive down its value. This is the first intervention in the markets by the Bank since the float in 1985.

Two suspected interventions followed, but they were not as successful as the first: the first appeared to be initially effective, with the dollar dropping to approximately US$0.7490 from near US$0.7620. However, within little more than a month it had risen to new post-float highs, reaching US$0.8103 on 23 July 2007.

After reaching its post-float record high in early 2008, the value of the NZ$ plummeted throughout much of the 2nd half of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009 as a response to the global economic downturn and flight by investors away from "riskier" currencies such as the NZ$. The NZ$ bottomed out at approximately US$0.50 on 6 March 2009. However, it rebounded strongly as the year progressed, reaching the US$0.75 range by November 2009.

By late 2012, the dollar was holding above 80 US cents, occasionally reaching 85¢, prompting calls from the Green Party for quantitative easing. Unions also called on the Government and the Reserve Bank to take action, but as of February 2013 both had declined.

As of early June 2017, the NZD was trading at approximately US$0.71, and in early November 2019 it was valued as US$0.63 = NZ$1.

Read More

Read Less