News and Opinion, sponsored by RaboPlus

By Roger J Kerr

There were no surprises with the weak employment data last week, causing both interest rates and the NZD to decrease.

Yet again the moneymarkets and bank economists have been forced by the economic facts to push their timing of OCR interest rate increases back to June/July form the previous March/April predictions. Go back a couple of months to early December a number of the bank economists were confidently predicting the first OCR increase in January 2010.

Unfortunately you never see any explanation as to why those forecasts were so wrong.

These interest rate forecasters are either just guessing with these very changeable predictions, or they are just so removed from what is actually happening in NZ businesses and industry sectors that their economic theory always dominates over the reality.
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