A review of things you need to know before you go home on Wednesday; new BNZ incentive, guest nights up strongly, fast start to dairy season, land release enquiry, swap rates rise

Here are the key things you need to know before you leave work today.

TODAY'S MORTGAGE RATE CHANGES
There were no changes today. It is only one day before the next RBNZ OCR review and Monetary Policy Statement, so that will be the next event to give a steer to interest rate direction.

TODAY'S DEPOSIT RATE CHANGES
There were no changes today.

MORTGAGE INCENTIVE VARIATION
In a variation of their cash incentive deal, BNZ today announced that for Christchurch customers only, they will pay for up to $3,000 of insulation if they take out a new BNZ home loan. Mitre10 will then give a quote. "If BNZ cannot cover the full amount of the insulation job, customers will be entitled to a 25% discount and bonus Fly Buys of the remaining amount."

MARKING TIME
Home loan approvals last week were unremarkable at 5,595 valued at $1.06 bln. That is -9.1% lower than for the same period a year ago.

TOURISM GROWS
Guest nights in July were +4.1% higher than the same month a year ago. That is a good increase. The occupancy rate was at 33.3%. Guest nights rose for holiday parks, motels, and hotels, but fell for backpacker accommodation. The strength was from domestic travelers rather than international travelers.

FAST START
Fonterra milk collection data to September 3 was up 5.3% over the same period a year ago. Growth is fastest in the South island where they are 8.3% ahead. (Growth is even faster for Fonterra in Australia where they are +10% ahead.) But it is the start of the season; Fonterra is now expecting the full NZ milk supply season to grow by +2%.

LAND FOR NEW HOUSING
The Government has asked the Productivity Commission to investigate ways to improve the way local authorities regulate to make land available for housing. The inquiry will start with an "issues paper"  and a preliminary list of key questions to be addressed. The Commission’s final report to the Government is due on 30 September 2015.

HOUSEHOLD BALANCE SHEETS
The RBNZ today revised the 2013 review of its household balance sheets by including student debt in the survey. As at the end of last year we owned $719 bln of housing, had $150 bln of bank deposits and other fixed interest assets, had $43 bln in retirement savings funds (like KiwiSaver), had $35 bln in other managed funds, owned $31 bln in local and overseas equities. All up, the financial assets of households totaled $266 bln. We owed $202 to banks (mostly for mortgages) and another $14 billion on our student loans. The net of all this shows we had net household wealth was $768 bln up, +17.3% from the previous year. $530 bln of the wealth was from housing equity.

WHOLESALE RATES
Swap rates rose today +2 or +3 bps across the board. The 90 day bank bill rate was down a point today at 3.68%.

OUR CURRENCY
Check our real-time charts here. The NZ dollar had an even quieter day unchanged from where it was at this time yesterday against the US dollar. We are at 82.5 USc, but we rose against the Aussie and are now at 89.9 AUc. The TWI is now under 78.9.

You can now see an animation of this chart. Click on it, or click here.