Here's our summary of key economic events overnight that affect New Zealand, with news the New Zealand currency and interest rates have fallen after the RBNZ dovish no-change Monetary Policy Statement as markets removed the factors that had priced in some risk for a rise.
Firstly in the US, mortgage applications fell again last week and are now -12% below year-ago levels. Their benchmark 30 year loan interest rate is still over 7% which keeps this market quiet.
The American merchandise trade balance in January was little-changed at about -US$90 bln for the month. It is always less when services are included.
The second estimate of Q4 US GDP confirmed the early estimate, adjusted an insignificant tick lower. The +3.2% expansion in Q4 came after the +4.9% Q3 expansion and +2.4% expansion for the year prior to that. By any measure that is a very good two year track record. They ended 2023 with an economy generating US$28 tln in economic activity, +US$1.5 tln more than at the same time a year earlier. (For perspective, that rise is about the same as the whole Australian economy for a year. And it is double the expansion of the Chinese economy.)
US inventories seem to be in reasonable shape too, overall. But retail inventories crept up solely due to rising unsold car stocks and we should keep an eye on that
In Hong Kong, a creditor of giant Chinese property developer Country Garden has petitioned a court for a winding up order. Country Garden's fall would be as big an earthquake as that of Evergrande. The implosion of the property development sector in the Middle Kingdom is not done yet.
Authorities are working to encourage buyers back into the sector. Success seems far away at present, but a key enticement are historic low mortgage interest rates.
EU sentiment was broadly stable in February even if both consumer and industry sentiment is still running below their long term averages. However retail, construction and the services sector are all running at about their long term average levels.
In Australia, their monthly CPI indicator stood at 3.4% in the year to January, unchanged from the previous month and less than market forecasts of 3.6%. Still, the latest reading pointed to the lowest since November 2021.
The UST 10yr yield starts today at 4.29% and little-changed from this time yesterday. The key 2-10 yield curve inversion is less at -37 bps. And their 1-5 curve inversion is unchanged at -72 bps. And their 3 mth-10yr curve inversion also little-changed at -110 bps. The Australian 10 year bond yield is now at 4.17% and down -1 bp. The China 10 year bond rate is now 2.39%, unchanged at an all-time low. The NZ Government 10 year bond rate is down a sharpish -9 bps at 4.82% on the changed OCR view.
Wall Street has started its Wednesday session little-changed on the S&P500. Overnight, European markets were mixed; London was down -0.7%, Frankfurt up +0.3% and the others in between. Yesterday Tokyo ended its Wednesday session little-changed but Hong Kong fell a sharp -1.5% and Shanghai was down -1.9%, both with late afternoon retreats. Singapore ended down -0.6%, an all-day affair for them. Meanwhile the ASX200 was little-changed but the NZX50 ended its Wednesday trade up +0.6% with a good afternoon session, bolstered by the removed risk of higher interest rates.
The price of gold will start today down a mere -US$1/oz from yesterday at US$2032/oz.
Oil prices are little-changed at just over US$78/bbl in the US while the international Brent price is now just under US$82/bbl. But that masks considerable volatility over the past 24 hours.
The OCR no-change has knocked back our currency. The Kiwi dollar starts today at just under 61 USc and down almost -¾c from this time yesterday. Against the Aussie we are down -½c at 93.8 AUc. Against the euro we are down almost -¾c at 56.2 euro cents. That all means our TWI-5 starts today at just under 70.4 and down more than -60 bps. But to be fair that just takes us back to where we were two and three weeks ago.
The bitcoin price starts today at US$61,787 and up another strong +8.2% from this time yesterday. It is now back to where it was more than two years ago. Its record high was US$67,633 in November 2021 - although with the retreat this week in the NZD, the bitcoin price in our currency is now over NZ$100,000. And at today's NZ$101,323 that is an all-time high. Volatility over the past 24 hours has been unsurprisingly very high as well at +/- 4.6%.
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118 Comments
One of the best things that ever happened was buying at the start of a 3 year bear market. The more I read, the more my conviction grew, so I just kept buying as the price kept dropping. Just a little bit each week or two when I thought it was a local low. $50 here and there. Couldn't afford anymore than that. And you really had to have conviction, during that time it was entirely possible the whole thing could fail. Now I've never been more bullish.
For those who think they are "too late", you're not. This is all only just getting rolling for real now. The equivalent of NZ internet speed doubling to 128 kbit/s in 1994. Google hasn't even been invented yet.
One of the best things that ever happened was buying at the start of a 3 year bear market.
Remember the huge 50% dump around March 2020? Seems like y'day. Honestly speaking I thought we had gone into "it's over" mode but still added to my sack. Chump change. Nevertheless, you would have been mercilessly ridiculed if you had mentioned that at the neighborhood BBQ. The more I look at my spreadsheets, the time between Q4 2018-Q12019 was a sweet spot for a 20x move on the ol' boomer coin.
One of the best things about ratty is that you learn about psychology - your own and those of different groups - maxis, cultists, normies, etc.
I remember. I was fishing at Tekapo and checking the price every 10 mins. The fish weren't biting, so I figured 'in for a penny, in for a pound'. I'm also enjoying ETH getting the benefit of this surge. Had to laugh as I'm an old dude and had to explain to my son what the halving is.
India demand plans offset Germany's total coal demand. All that that Germany industry capacity shut down by ecoloon policies had to go somewhere.
"...Even the most cautious of forecasts at the conference saw demand for all grades of coal reaching 1.5 billion metric tons by 2030, with some reaching as high as 1.9 billion.
To put that in context, India's coal demand was 1.23 billion tons, composed of domestic production of 964 million tons and imports of around 266 million.
Put another way, even the more pessimistic of forecasts expects an increase of nearly 300 million tons of coal demand in India in the next six years, an increase of 25%.
To put the scale of the increase in context, 300 million tons is more than the total annual demand of Germany, the fourth-biggest coal-consuming nation after China, India and the United States."
https://www.reuters.com/markets/commodities/indias-coal-sector-sees-hug…
Reuters reporting it as an matter of fact, economic necessity and all that, what a sham.
Europe might need to catch a look at themselves in the mirror, I am sure they think they look like strong global leaders but in reality the reflection would be a deluded and rapidly dying old man.
The second estimate of Q4 US GDP confirmed the early estimate, adjusted an insignificant tick lower. The +3.2% expansion in Q4 came after the +4.9% Q3 expansion and +2.4% expansion for the year prior to that.
Past time to eliminate overhead costs of rent extraction from national GDP accounting.
Whereas formal economic models explicitly state their assumptions (whether realistic or not), national accounting frameworks feature various implicit boundaries, which are not shown along with the data but are rather buried in technical notes on ‘methodology’. For example, the interest- based financial services mentioned above were originally considered mere transfers and thus outside the production boundary before 1968 (Christophers 2011). The 1968 System of National Accounts (1968 SNA) moved the production boundary by representing these services as inputs to an imaginary sector (thus making the assumption that they were ‘implicitly’ productive), whereas the 1993 SNA moved it further by considering such services to be the final consumption of households (and thus explicitly productive). The 2008 SNA went even further by stipulating that even the lending of banks’ own funds was a productive activity (dropping the pretense of ‘intermediation’ between savers and borrowers originally used to portray banking as a productive activity). In each of these cases the assumption of the level of productiveness of interest-based financial services was not explicit in the data, but rather implicit in the location of the boundary. Similarly, R&D expenditures by firms, governments and non-profit organizations were previously assumed to be intermediate inputs (or costs) of these entities, and thus deducted from GDP, but have been reclassified by SNA 2008 as investments in fixed assets, and are thus now counted in GDP. This adjustment added around $560 billion to US GDP in 2013 (when the country adopted SNA 2008) - more than Sweden’s entire output that year - and conveniently reinforced “America’s status as the world’s largest economy and [opened] up a bit more breathing space over fast-closing China” (EIU 2013). Different boundaries in the national accounts are thus based on different assumptions and lead to different results, but less explicitly than formal economic models. This contrast with explicit models is thus the second reason why MMT had not yet affected national accounting. Most economists do not even learn the details of national accounting in their professional training, and the measurement (or rather construction) of macroeconomic aggregates such as GDP is outsourced to official statisticians. It is simply not considered part of the conversation, neither in mainstream nor in heterodox circles. Link/GDP overhead
MMT has always come across as behavioural psychology theory rather than a serious economic one. It's no less valuable for that but it has a strong dependence on non-economic behaviours in my view.
As regards the financialisation of GDP, the question is why not as much as why. If those rents are measured as income and tax is therefore paid, does it matter that the revenue was sourced from rent as opposed to some more physical activity?
The minute we agreed on Fiat tender and we gave up on gold and physical trade as the exchange medium we gave up on this thinking.
In reality, capitalisim could not have coped with the explosive population growth without the Fiat currency and leverage it allowed. You may see that as a bad thing PDK, but there are a billion+ people in the world that owe their standard of living to it.
"there are a billion+ people in the world that owe their standard of living to it."
This is true, albeit temporary. A wise species would have taken the "Population Bomb" seriously and adopted a no growth population and economy strategy. But of course capitalism has been adopted as a religion, rather than a financial system.
The minute we agreed on Fiat tender and we gave up on gold and physical trade as the exchange medium we gave up on this thinking.
Then add inn the USA's additional contributions such as opening up the derivatives market and the removal of regulation over the long term. They then caused several financial crises and surprise surprise, the way out of these was what benefits the central bankers and those that caused the dilemmas in the first place. I agree that the world is far too disconnected with money as a representation of value for something physical, heck even in the 90s there was much more cash around, cheques (good riddance) and more things were physical as opposed to today where there is a lot more assets and things in the digital space.
Yes. This is a classic go woke go broke real life example. They may get picked up by some new owner. But the people that are there (if they want employment) will have to start reporting the news, and not sob stories about how criminals feel sad, and reading the weather in a language no-one speaks. This is why no one watches any more. Any one that takes this over would realize that of course and understand that woke news reporting is a non-viable business model, so an attitude change is going to be required for any of these 'reporters' if they want to keep their jobs. It is quite amusing that it has taken this long, but, I guess the same company apparently owns CNN which is also a loser station that has crashed in the ratings as a direct result of the same business model that NewsHub employed. There will be no government help for them either.
You mean the people that know where to get their news when it is current, on overseas web sites with proper journalists rather than wait 3 weeks for NewsHub to report it wrong, or in their own opinion or in Maori. Their news was a complete joke, and not accurate. No wonder people turned off and they went broke. The anti-woke audience is not older, less educated and poorer either. You are dead wrong there. Using your logic then the poor, uneducated and retired all voted for NACT in the last election (making them all extreme right wing according to you), which is completely false. The poor, and uneducated voted for Labour, Greens and TPM, always have always will (with the exception of a few elites that have a few screws loose). The fact is (and you cannot escape it), NewsHub was a left wing govt mouth piece, no one watched it any more and it rightly gone broke. Is there any part of that you can dispute ? or are you telling me that despite going broke with no audience they are a vibrant money making enterprise and their owners just can't be bothered making all this money offering left wing tripe any more.
Having a listen to NewstalkZB callers completely undermines this claim, though.
As does the international research, which highlights that the more highly educated have moved left in political leanings over time: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2021/05/29/educated-voters-lef…
People fortunate enough to receive money but not much education (e.g. through NZ housing and tax policy over the decades) still lean right, possibly through less exposure to broadness of information and ideas. This is obviously a pretty nominal "Right" lean though, as they choose left-wing social supports for themselves at every turn, in New Zealand.
Another source highlighting the alignment of exposure to information and critical thinking with becoming more liberal: https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/04/26/a-wider-ideological-gap…
So, the highly educated favour re-distribution and general incompetence that we have seen over the last six years ? Working hard so they can give all their money to those that cannot be bothered, and then compete with the same people that haven't and won't contribute for the same services that they already paid for. Yes, you are right, there are quite a few of these types of loons about and they appear to be growing in number. It is very clear that there is something wrong with the education system, and so that is where the fix is required.
The highly educated favour some redistribution to a wider swathe of society, it seems, while the less educated favour redistribution primarily to themselves. So it seems in NZ.
Moreover, yes, we have established that more highly educated people lean left while lowly educated lean right (that is, for application to others, not themselves).
OK, so I assume you mean highly educated people that favour redistribution and have money, or supposed highly educated people that have a degree of no value. Lets assume we are are talking about the first group, and I am wondering why these highly educated people on the left did not support the bastion of the left (the Labour party) and left them high and dry on funding, with the only people contributing being the unions (who are far from the highly educated category).
You should read the cited sources to understand what they meant by highly educated, if any clarity is needed.
And if you wish to propose that specific voting demographics in NZ went some other way (how specific demographics and educational levels in NZ voted in the last election), provide supporting data to back up your proposition - rather than declaring that something is so then wondering why your declaration of reality might be that way.
I get that you are disappointed that right minded people in this country rightly voted the Labour/Greens rabble out, and it is hard to accept that all their useless nonsense being cancelled in extra quick time. Long may that continue, and you should know that it has majority support, and is becoming more popular as it is carried out. Hard to accept yes, are you upset about it, obviously. The thread started with NewsHub going bust. The reasons why have not changed between then and now. They were woke, and they are broke, they are a casualty and this is just the start.
But it is correct. You look at any of these complaint cultures. Something bad has always happened to them, so they join one of the usual suspect groups, or claim the are of some different gender or something stupid and it’s always always someone else’s fault for a whole variety of made up reasons and it just goes on and on and in. It’s pathetic really…..and the of course there are the handouts and continual support and continuing moaning.
We were talking about other stuff, but okay, sure, now you're talking about something we see at every level of NZ society. We've just spun up hundreds of millions to buy out wet properties and clean up silted commercial properties, rather than them standing on their own two feet, while our PM who says "If I can pay, I should pay" has his hand out for taxpayer money at every opportunity, while our older generations want "rugged individualism" for others yet have voted for taxpayer handouts for property and a welfare benefit for themselves with no qualifiers. All continual moaning, handouts, support... and NewsTalkZB a droning complaint culture.
The anti woke audience is mainly older / less educated / poorer
Strong disagree with you there Jim unless you're talking about those on the extremist end of the woke debate. Although some fit these categories, many are simply fed up with being spoon fed excuses and especially the increase in the number of people who cannot have a factual, rational and logical debate where two parties can agree to disagree. Instead we have the increasing prevalence of being labelled something based on a personal opinion and made out to be a horrific person resultingly, instead of having a discussion where both parties can learn from each other, as has been the historical norm in intellectual democratic societies. This culture seeping into our tertiary educational facilities will, if left unchecked, and unchallenged, lower the quality of education and critical thinking across our society.
As I've experienced having my life/career successes attacked/diminished because I'm white/male and that I should check my racial privilege etc.....all coming from a white, female close family member who has made very poor life choices, and would rather jump on a race & gender based victim bandwagon to bring people down to her level to compensate.
Anybody of any race who is actually successful and intelligent will not partake in this sort of culture, as you say we're giving a solid almost untouchable platform to backwards thinking unproductive morons.
Is that where this guy is/was employed? I seem to have missed his whole career. I mean I've heard stories about Gower saying this and saying that, but I can't remember seeing him actually saying anything. Have I missed anything important? Thought not.
NZ is such a tiny fish bowl. So many manufactured "celebrities" that are all ego and no substance.
Don't want to hear what you don't want to hear?
Always a flawed approach....
Ends up with mindless chanting - MAGA, MAGA, MAGA.....
On in NZ's case: GROWTH, GROWTH, GROWTH....
it's not democracy is the victim here - it's truth. Which has existential repercussions.
Newshub has no moral high ground wrt either democracy or truth
https://sknight.substack.com/p/new-zealand-news-channel-invents
Good journalism would investigate, and explain - Why Trump?
https://www.interest.co.nz/opinion/95460/murray-grimwood-aka-interestco…
That for me is the core difference.
It should be about reporting impartial facts so the viewer can come to their own conclusion.
Yet, now it is about influencing the viewers opinion to match that of the reporter/organisation/government.
It used to be called propoganda.
There is no such thing as reporting impartial facts. The act of choosing what facts to report is in and off itself partial.
The people who claim newshub is woke are really just saying they don't want to hear anything that might make them feel uncomfortable, they want the comfortable narratives that confirm their own prejudices.
Journalists investigate facts and then write their stories based on those facts, there is always an element of framing in the way those facts are presented and described. But the key thing about proper journalism is that the facts themselves are sacred and have to be presented in context, whether the slant they take is right leaning or left leaning. There are absolute standards that must be met.
When we lose media outlets staffed by proper journalists we lose those standards and they are replaced by non-journalists who do not have any objective standards. The same is happening with science.
There is a concerted effort to make people lose faith in objective reality, science, evidence based policy. Ask yourself who benefits when this happens?
What sort of power fills the gap (hint it's not pretty, look no further than US Republicans and gun laws, or even at the extremes Isis, Hamas and what blind faith in ideology over evidence leads to).
"There is a concerted effort to make people lose faith in objective reality, science, evidence based policy. Ask yourself who benefits when this happens?" Yes this is getting very scary. So many people will believe any crap they are told on social media.
God knows how many articles I have read about health that are just the opinion of some nutritionist with virtually no qualifications, yet people assume it is fact.
"There is no such thing as reporting impartial facts" - agree. For example, lets take one of the anti woke's favourite subject, cycling. You could report that cycling numbers are up x% last year and cycling is booming, or you could report that cycling makes up a tiny fraction of journeys and isn't worth investment. Both those statements may be correct.
Personally I prefer reporting that outlines both sides of the argument, but I am very unusual in that regard. Most people only want an opinion they can agree with and gravitate to media that gives them that, its why Mike Hosking is so popular.
The act of choosing what facts to report is in and off itself partial.
100%. Most people don't even realise the extent to which "facts" are manipulated before being presented. My job is data, reporting, and analysis. You can present anything, anyway, anyhow, with the right assumptions, "privacy" redactions, and "management".
There is a concerted effort to make people lose faith in objective reality, science, evidence based policy.
Yip, covid was an amazing insight into everything, and where we are heading is a new "dark ages".
Yeah, we don't need to be spoon fed what we should feel. It is pretty obvious that Trump is a horrible person with no redeeming features without the news readers having to hint at it.
However I am not sure that trying to go back to the 70's with monosyllabic reporting of a script that the reporters have no personal interest in would help them fight back against the modern media and advertising landscape. That sure isn't what they are competing against online.
" It is pretty obvious that Trump is a horrible person with no redeeming features without the news readers having to hint at it."
This just displays a complete level of ignorance beyond belief. The ONLY reason we know Trump is a horrible person with no redeeming features is because we have an independent media that is allowed to report that he is. Why do you think Putin is able to continue to hold power in Russia? Hint - could it be because the local media are not allowed to actually tell the population what is happening and what he's doing.
**** Edited to delete ad hominem, my apologies****
No they can't if all they have to go on is the stories that are told about him.
I know he's an immoral disgrace of a human being because I know someone who worked with him years ago and I trust this person's judgement. But you can only make that call if you've met the person or know someone who has met the person. If you don't have that then you have nothing to go on but the media who chooses to report certain facts.
" It is pretty obvious that Trump is a horrible person with no redeeming features without the news readers having to hint at it."
It's more than hinting.
We are influenced by journalist choices. It's rare to see an ordinary Trump photo. The ones they usually choose, including by interest.co, have him grimacing or in some odd pose. Quite bizarre.
Their choices make a difference.
You are either voting left or right, the two presidential candidates are both rubbish, but the president is mainly a figure head, do you think Biden is really running the country? Mty god the man doesn't know what year it is...
No its the appointments the Dems made as they got in, and it will be the same on the right....
Either way the deep state and military etc do not change that much, America is a war machine, it's how they make money. However they are paying for the Ukraine more then Europe and its pissing off the republicans... trump will make Europe pay more , and they will.... Many on the right do not like trump but they hate the left and Biden more...
Illegal immigration is a huge voting thing this year in the USA
Looking through the Quarterly CPI inflation table in the MPS, it looks like the 1.8% increase in Sept 2023 is going to hold up the yearly results for a while, but all the Quarterly results from Dec 2023 onwards look to be bouncing around 0.5% per quarter. So the RBNZ think we are already at the mid-point of our target band, assuming things play out the way they predict?
The US GDP only grows through governement spending due to the CHIPS - and Inflation reduction acts. Because everything needs to have at least 50% American made components the rest of the world won't benefit. The rest of the world is only required to absorb the government deficits created by this.
Wouldn't say huge, I have been tracking the total listings in my area for 5 years and they are about back to the peak. Yes its heading for double the lowest I have ever seen but during Covid it really was not the time to sell. Factor in that it is summer and March is the peak then not really exceptional. Every year there are more houses total so its only ever going to climb. Put the word "Mortgagee" into the search and it came back with just 2 listings and one was a section only.
In Hong Kong, a creditor of giant Chinese property developer Country Garden has petitioned a court for a winding up order. Country Garden's fall would be as big an earthquake as that of Evergrande. The implosion of the property development sector in the Middle Kingdom is not done yet. Indeed:
China has just made a significant move by cutting its key mortgage rate more than ever before, signaling growing concerns within its financial system. Here's why it matters and what it reveals about the underlying issues facing Chinese banks. Link
ANZ: We got this one totally wrong
https://www.stuff.co.nz/money/350196029/we-got-one-totally-wrong-what-o…
Minister of Housing wants house prices 3-5 times median incomes within the next 10-20 years.
If the explosion of house building that he says his policies will create actually happens, great. Anyway, he's saying the right things. Now we wait to see if he does the right things (current policies not withstanding).
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2024/02/housing-minister-chris-…
Specifying the goal is the first part of a a long mission here. I wonder if he will begin measuring and reporting on it? (not very much I suspect he will not :)).
The waters feel like there must be a small black budgie somewhere in the mix, servicing the debt at these interest rates is already constraining spending. Unfortunately housing debt is private debt that cannot be managed by QE :(.
Has he said he is willing to bring in measures that will bring prices down or is he hoping by some miracle that wages will go through the moon and for inflation to stay under control?
How do his words mesh with the actual actions the govt are taking, e.g. rolling back Labour policies that were actually starting to bring house prices down?
This will be the same as the Tobacco laws where they are going to reduce tobacco harm by *checks notes* liberalising tobacco sales.
Yeah right.
It worries me that he thinks housing affordability is measured in income multiples. He will never achieve "3-5 times median incomes" unless interest rates increase significantly (excessive inflation) or the market is saturated with houses (who will be building them at a loss, the government?).
Unless there is excess supply (which requires someone to build them at a loss), house prices will be determined by what people can afford to pay, and that is largely determined by interest rates.
CV = Land value plus improvements.
Real hard to make land cheaper unless the price just falls as councils extract such high fees and the RC is demanding re services etc. Huge new suburb going in behind Ara hills Millwater/Wainui area, Fulton Hogan are doing public consultation now, its on a 96 acre farm that was purchased a while back. Its impossible for this scale to be cheap... I think about 2500 new sites
According to infometrics "The average household income in Auckland was $159,176 in 2023, which was higher than the New Zealand average of $127,423." So $477k to build a brand new house at 3 x income. Maybe possible if you happened to get free flat land already subdivided and consented with all services (very unlikely). But if that free land was an ex farm in the middle of nowhere (the Demographia dream), even if it had adequate services at the boundary, you would still need to subdivide and build roads / pipes / power / etc within. That alone may cost $100k per house. But more likely it wont have all the required services at the boundary if it is in the middle of nowhere (hence free), then it would really blow out.
In reality I think you would be struggling to even achieve 5x income if the land was at farm prices and the council were nice enough to build all services to the boundary for free.
This is a good point, and this is how it has been done up to now, Govt looking after social housing only and leaving the mid and top end to private industry.
The problem is the supply is to constrained, and scaling up social housing simply increases the scarcity of building companies and supplies, raising the price.
I think the most successful model was an end to end (including milling the wood) model that we followed in the 70's where the NZ Housing Dept built a lot of our current social housing stock. It took focus and a significant investment but it worked.
There were 3 million of us. We were still drawing-down a local resource-stock (we called it red pine, then). Every then build, was closer to an urban hub, that any now ones. Same goes for every parameter; the tradies then maybe came to work in Vauxhall12; on a BSA sloper or a 3-speed bike. They had hand-tools all the modern complexity is seen as cost-saving, but added together, demands a bigger 'wage' to cover it. The (detached) buildings were smaller, and simpler (yes, less efficient).
We will go back to societal-good as a goal, but not with the current 'everything as cheap as I can get, now - but I expect a profit' mentality. That was temporary.
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