Here are the key things you need to know before you leave work today (or if you already work from home, before you shutdown your laptop).
MORTGAGE RATE CHANGES
None to report again today.
TERM DEPOSIT/SAVINGS RATE CHANGES
None here either. Update: ANZ has raised most term deposit rates for terms to 1 year, nothing longer. That makes their new six month rate 5.00% and their new one year rate 5.50%. At these levels they match BNZ's new rates, but are less than some key challenger banks.
AUCKLAND 'VALUE' EVAPORATES
There has been a dramatic slide in house prices affecting both Auckland's most expensive and cheapest suburbs. The median house prices in Central Auckland is now down almost -$400,000 over the last 15 months. According to REINZ data, from November 2021 to February 2023, median house prices in Auckland have fallen -22.4%. In Papakura (population 30,000), the fall has been more than -31% over the same period. These sharp shifts lower are going to make it very tough for new-builds to cover their construction costs.
IMPOSING COSTS ON CITIZENS WHO CAN'T USE PUBLIC TRANSPORT
Auckland Transport is now advising that its huge 'investment' in its City Rail Link project will need 24% more money. On top of its already approved cost of $4.4 bln, it now says its contractors want another +$1.1 bln, making the total cost $5.5 bln. It will certainly end up an engineering marvel, a train set worthy of a 20th century European city. Whether this 'investment' will ever generate any return is still debatable, although fixed rail train buffs trying to build a little London here will tell you the return is more than just on the money sunk. Auckland city ratepayers may have a different view. As with all public transport projects, it works if you can force non-riders to pay. Central government said it is not going to pick up a greater share than its 50/50 deal of the extra $1 bln. Meanwhile, rising costs and falling patronage has driven Auckland Transport to raise its existing commuting prices, effective April 1, 2023.
WORST ON RECORD?
New Zealand's current account deficit was its widest on record in 2022, but is forecasted to narrow as tourism returns. In 2022 it was out of balance by -8.9% of GDP. Readers should remember that New Zealand also has a Capital Account, and a Financial Account. As tough as the Current Account is, it doesn't necessarily follow that our overseas debt is rising the same way. In fact, our Net External Debt to GDP has remained stable at about -47% since 2019. That is far better than the -84% depth is plunged to in 2008 (the modern low). See this.
CARBON PRICE KEEPS FALLING
The spot carbon price opened at $63.25/NZU today, its lowest since August 2021. However today it has since blipped up to $66.50/NZU (although it got as high as $69/NZD intra-day) in a sharpish recovery. That comes after today's NZU tender failure where none were released by the Government in the first auction for 2023. There were 4.475 mln units on offer but didn't meet the reserve and all of these units will now roll over to the next auction in June.
MORE CYCLONE RECOVERY SUPPORT
The Government has doubled its business support package to $50 mln today, saying demand for grants has been strong, with estimates showing applications will exceed the initial $25 mln business support package. This scheme delivers grants of up to a maximum of $40,000 per business, to be distributed by local organisations in affected regions.
CHINA DATA UNDERWHELMS
China's February data came in pretty much as expected for their first full opening-up month. Retail sales rose +3.5% in a no-surprise result, good but not that strong really. Industrial production was up +2.4%, a tad less than expected. Real estate development is not falling anywhere near as fast as it did in 2022, but it is still falling.
SWAP RATES TURN BACK UP
Wholesale swap rates likely bounced back sharply today across most of the curve. However, the real action in swap rates comes near the close. Our chart will record the final positions. The 90 day bank bill rate is up +8 bps at 5.09% and now only +34 bps above the current OCR. The Australian 10 year bond yield is now at 3.46% and up +10 bps from this morning. The China 10 year bond rate is little-changed at 2.90%. And the NZ Government 10 year bond rate is now at 4.42% and up +14 bps from this this time yesterday to make back all of the prior day's yield drop but still above the earlier RBNZ fix at 4.36% which was up +13 bps from yesterday. The UST 10 year is at 3.68% with a +11 bps rise from this time yesterday. Bond markets are more comfortable with the regulatory response, it seems, and are refocusing on what the Fed will do with too-high US inflation.
EQUITIES MAKE STRONG RECOVERIES, MOSTLY
Wall Street ended its Tuesday session up +1.7% on the S&P500. Today, Tokyo has opened up +0.2%, but Hong Kong has opened up a heady +2.3% in very early trade. Shanghai is up +0.5% at their open. In afternoon trade, the ASX200 is up +0.4%. But the NZX50 is up only half of that in their late trading.
GOLD STOPS RISING
In early Asian trade, gold is virtually unchanged from this time yesterday at US$1903/oz.
NZD HOLDS FIRM
The Kiwi dollar is a little firmer than where we were this time yesterday, now at 62.3 USc. Against the Aussie we are also holding at 93.3 AUc. And against the euro we are still at 58 euro cents. That means the TWI-5 is still at 70.6 and unchanged from yesterday.
BITCOIN VOLATILE
The bitcoin price has moved little today, now at US$24,775 and 'only' +1.6% higher than this time yesterday. At one point it hit US$26,500, but then fell back sharply. Volatility is extreme again today at +/-5.0%.
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85 Comments
IMPOSING COSTS ON CITIZENS WHO CAN'T USE PUBLIC TRANSPORT
sure its only fair us Rodney ratepayers should help while we dodge potholes......
Luckily we feel well off as our properties only dropped 200k on average, compared with 400k, for the people who can use said CRL project to get to work each day.....
This is one that doesnt surprise me "That means prices in Papakura are now down by almost a third (-31.9%) compared to 15 months ago. I was very dubious of the 1 to 1.2million dollar sales in south Auckland. This is definitely a 'correction'. And over to the swap markets is back up today, a traders dream.
GPT-4 is here, and it is actually rather incredible (versus the already incredible ChatGPT).
On the demo, a crudely-drawn image of a website 'wireframe' was turned into a functioning web page.
It can spit out thousands of words of content that is as good as what many businesses are paying web agencies, freelancer copywriters etc to write in a fraction of the time and for a fraction of the cost.
It can look at images and interpret them to an impressive standard.
The technology is astounding - it's the most "exciting" tech development since the Internet became mainstream - but with how powerful it is already there are going to be some serious ramifications for a lot of knowledge economy workers.
Last week I used ChatGPT (the now old hat version) to create a specific piece of code that was customised to a client's website that would normally have required going back to their website developer and being charged anywhere from 4-6 hours of chargeable work to scope, build and test.
I described the issue and desired outcome, and in less than 30 seconds it wrote me a code that worked perfectly first time and solved a challenging problem. The total time I invested in this was less than 30 minutes from having the brain fart to try ChatGPT, through to writing my input, through to publishing the code and testing its validity.
There is going to be an army of developers, content writers, editors etc whose jobs may be rendered totally redundant by this new wave of AI tech - I think this really could alter the "dynamics" of the labour market substantially.
Maybe the UBI crowd are on to something? Or there are going to be a lot of people retraining into more manual labour (strangely enough I seem to recall Michael Burry of Big Short Fame talking about how 'knowledge economy' tasks and jobs like web/app developers are going to be automated and collapse in value, whereas we all think of automation replacing burger flippers or other menial jobs but that is actually harder to derive a return from due to the lower cost of labour).
A lot of tech (software or hardware) is overhyped for no good reason.
GPT AI and the various competitors/spin offs really does feel like something different to me.
I'm lucky (so far) insomuch that my gainful employment is really predicated on problem solving in a more abstract sense, something which AI tools aren't great at yet.
However, if I look at the work I did early in my career almost all of it could be replicated, probably to a higher standard, by GPT-4.
Maybe we should just welcome our AI/robot overlords and chill out on the couch. I've got a big back catalogue on my PS5 to get through anyway.
My overlords will live 10km away in a datacenter in Silverdale.... that said everytime there is a tropical cyclone they will be turned off for 72 hours.
If I was a call center worker I would be well worried. On the positive Air NZ may finally be able to provide some sort of customer service at scale. AI could rebook hundreds of people per minute.
It will be interesting to see where machine learning ends up. I haven’t seen too many practical use cases yet. Generally it’s only useful for something so complicated that an algorithm can’t do it and where you have loads of high quality tagged data. So something like a self driving car yes, but rebooking flights could surely be done by a simple algorithm.
Half agree with you - automation has been around for a long time. What can be done with AI is seriously impressive and shouldn't be dismissed, however it lacks innovation and forward thinking and always will. It is input output, nothing magic is happening, it's predicting the best output of 1s and 0s after being trained on existing 1s and 0s. We already hit a limit of workers in the tech space around the time covid hit, and despite big tech layoffs in the US there is still a lot of room for innovation and productivity improvement through technology. Can AI apply critical thinking to a new problem and solve it? No. Can AI replace developers solving existing problems? Somewhat. If this were truly the case, developers would have been replaced by the booming open source community, instead it is used to augment efficiency and move on.
Development has become inefficient once more, AI can be used to make this process more efficient in solving existing problems but you have to know what those problems are first and how to solve them, maintain them, improve them and eventually replace them with the next big thing. Failing that, there will be many new roles in machine learning over the next decade and who is best fit to move into those? Software engineers and mathematicians. And finally, development is not a career for the feint hearted - you must reinvent your skills every few years to remain on top of your career. Moving from one language to another is as common as switching hammers. Shifting from one technology to another (software to machine learning) is no different.
I agree with you (you articulated my point better than I did). There are still roles within the wider knowledge economy that - if anything - will become more important and valuable with the rise of AI.
However, there is also a lot of 'code monkey' or 'typewriter monkey'-type work that is currently paying people's salaries and wages and cutting that out will be where AI shines in a manner that is good for the bottom line but potentially quite detrimental to society.
I am not a developer, but I know some whose work could never be replaced by AI and others who could disappear into the ether tomorrow and ChatGPT could easily fill the void.
I'm a lawyer and while I certainly find Chat GPT useful for my work (as a guide), answering questions in bar exams is very different to providing advice on the sorts of issues lawyers have to deal with in practice. I do think AI will drastically reduce the number of professionals that this profession requires/can support though.
On the AI part of ChatGPT, I was writing an essay on the weekend for a Uni paper and asked ChatGPT for a quote. She responded with a fairly useful quote that matched my point, and she also provided the reference @ a UN website. Unfortunately when I drilled down to that website, the quote was nowhere to be found. She had also referenced a survey from 2005 in India, I found the source stuff for that - but again, the stats had nothing to do with the quote she provided. Moral of the story - she's making stuff up!!!
Agreed you have to be very careful when relying on it for 'facts and figures'-type content. I use it for ideas and building blocks of some of the writing I do for various projects (for example I'm a contributor to a niche publication) but I will always go and verify the hard numbers as it is frequently wrong on this , for example telling me a specific item was in production for many years after production stopped ... although I suspect accuracy will improve over time.
Where I find it much more effective and useful is in creating Excel/Google Sheet formulas and macros, writing little bits of code that in the past would have meant buying some basic plugin or tool that a third party had created, and also summarising long-form content e.g. taking the transcription from a workshop with a client that has been recorded with Otter.ai and then having ChatGPT summarise it. It can also make very good travel itineraries if you are precise with the inputs.
Just asking it to "write an article on the history of NZ house price inflation" and expecting an accurate response is a risky business.
I think it’s a bit of a gimmick in a way. Maybe it’s ok for personal use, but for businesses to use it it needs to be 100% accurate, consistent and testable. Businesses love the concept of machine learning, but most can’t afford to give the wrong information to people. Can you imagine a bank, power company, insurance company, etc using AI over a fixed set of carefully crafted and tested answers?
You think its going to be free forever?
If so, more fool you, it will be pay for play soon, Microsoft has sunk billions of free AWS compute processing into this.
You think they're being nice, or getting you hooked until they reprice it to be slightly cheaper than using an agency to make your website?
Of course it's not going to be free forever. I already pay for the premium option, and I'm under no illusion that will do anything but go up in price over time (although I suspect the real value for the parent company will be in selling API access so you can use the tech in other apps, which isn't something I'm doing).
Even at a substantially higher cost the value proposition for many tasks is still vastly superior to paying someone to do the work.
WTI price-wise today just pennies from setting a new more-than-year low, threatening to break below the lower end of the weird narrow range it has been in last four months. You'd think the Fed would be paying attention to this since WTI moves the CPI more than any other factor. Link
t looked like the energy sector had finally adjusted to "disappointing" global demand earlier, as WTI curve moved toward backwardation after epic crude build to start '23. But now futures curve is back to contango - demand/liquidity becoming a problem yet again. Link
Think about it Sherlock:
- Buses get caught in traffic jams, trains don’t and are generally much more reliable
- Bus services and frequency of services have been cut quite dramatically in the last 1-2 years because of driver shortages
I take the train to the city three days a week. The Kiwirail stuff has been a debacle, but putting that to one side, the train services are reliable and frequent. Unlike most bus services.
One of the advantages of rail is the very fact it is locked into a single route compared to buses that can go anywhere. It provides certainty that development will be in the right place. People have certainty that they will be on an effective transport route.
Motorways get stuffed with traffic, buses compete with other traffic and road uses like parking and cycling.
Perhaps interest.co.nz finally ‘gets it’ in terms of residential construction prospects, with the final sentence under the Auckland Values item. The rhetoric over the last 1-2 years here is that building consent numbers are high so all is fine and dandy. I have repeatedly cautioned on the lagging nature of this data.
As I have said like a broken record for the past 1.5 years, the convergence of the following factors is a looming disaster for residential construction:
- plunging house prices
- surging construction costs
- surging costs of finance (hits developers as well as buyers)
- oversupply
What you won't get on MSM here about wind projects.
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/11/14/dissecting-a-wind-project-an-int…
As far as I'm aware it still hasn't gone ahead under another guise. Surprised the Maoris haven't gone to the govt for taxpayers money to expedite this.
Perhaps even too much risk for funds from a tribal settlement.
I have to add, most economic observers didn’t seem to ‘get it’ even though it’s very simple.
Most notably, if government agencies like Treasury and the RBNZ, and bank economists ‘ got it’, they wouldn’t be predicting unemployment next year of 5-6%, rather it would be *at least* 7-8%.
Who knows, maybe they are counting on all the recent entries on visas to be the cannon fodder, softening the unemployment blow in terms of citizens and permanent residents.
"Auckland Transport is now advising that its huge 'investment' in its City Rail Link project will need 24% more money. On top of its already approved cost of $4.4 bln, it now says its contractors want another +$1.1 bln, making the total cost $5.5 bln. "
Yes, and I want a red sports car.
Insane amounts of money spent on a few slow trams, faster to get to work on a bicycle.
Please do not use the term "Metro" on your signs, people mistakenly think it is the same fast transport that many other countries had for years.
This is a massive mistake that is forced on all tax payers in Auckland, slow trains for mega money. Sigh.
Under Len Brown not 1 km of bus lane was created. Why? So that train patronage numbers would be as high as possible. Whereas with some expenditure, buses could have gone in all sorts of useful directions. Plus if you want to save the planet you could have electric buses like there used to be in Wn..
zero
I was watching the price action in the weekend.
There was indeed a slight move in the price (I think 20,200 to 20,800 or so) but that happened early on. The move was then arbitraged back.,
The huge move up was when USDC had recovered to around 95c
And also remember there are other stable coins like USDT that you can "flee" to
The scepticism about the city rail link and European train networks is pretty funny. You don’t often see people who think a functional public transport system is a bad idea. Certainly when I visited European cities I didn’t think “wow these guys should really learn from Auckland and all get in their cars.” As for forcing people to pay for things, car drivers benefit from public transport infrastructure even if they don’t use it. Auckland’s roading issues would be even worse if rail did not exist. Imagine Wellington! So it makes sense for car users to pay for trains and buses. And that’s before you get to the health/climate issues resulting from vehicles. Electric trains of course being zero emission and helping the country balance its carbon budget.
When you look at public transport infrastructure, how often do you hear someone say I wish we didn’t invest in that after some time has passed? Never in my experience.
I don’t know if the skeptics are really considering its catalyst potential ie. that the corridor could become a high density, mixed use corridor, supplying a significant proportion of Auckland’s housing over the next 30 years. The light rail would support this land use, and vice versa.
Having said that, the idea of an underground service is crazy, and the cost obscene. But I don’t think an at grade option necessarily is (although I am reserving judgement a little)
It’s not even the light rail the author is throwing rocks at, the criticism is aimed at the city rail link - the current project.
I do have concerns about the light rail because of the mixed objectives of connecting certain suburbs and connecting the airport. If I was spending $15B I’d do the high speed train to Hamilton and then connect the airport to that southern line.
High speed rail to Hamilton won’t help much. Better to connect Aucklanders to Auckland than Hamiltonian’s.
The light rail route is a very good one, unlike our existing rail / busway corridors a lot of the LR route has many people living in close proximity to the stations. Look at the southern train line for example, there is motorway on way side making walkability to stations pretty poor. Stations like Parnell, Remuera, Greenlane etc are barely used.
The two guys that are in charge of light rail:
- One has made a career of building/proposing massive infrastructure projects, the bigger the better
- The other by designing tunnels
It's no surprise that the solution being proposed is a super expensive massive tunnel.
Go back to the original surface light rail and be done with it.
NZ Rail History – Robbie’s Transport Dream Derailed
Auckland’s Mayor Dove-Myer Robinson, affectionately known as Robbie, did much to change the face of transport in the city in the 1960s.
An electrified railway, underground in parts, he said, with trains fanning out every three minutes from central Auckland to Howick, the airport and the North Shore.
The Auckland Regional Authority (ARA), for one, didn’t like his vision one bit. In fact the ARA was seriously considering scrapping the city’s rail network altogether in favour of the car. Nor did the politicians down in Wellington – too expensive they complained as they shunted Robbie’s vision aside.
Opposition to his vision, though, did nothing to stop Auckland’s two big rapidly growing challenges – escalating congestion on the roads, and its sprawling, isolated suburbs.
“If only we’d listened to Robbie,” was to become a familiar saying whenever the city’s car- dependent transport system was debated.
Interesting reading on liquidity injections that created the stock market rally early this year, and are now goneburger:
https://www.macrobusiness.com.au/2023/03/goodbye-liquidity-goodbye-stoc…
Jeremy Grantham also has a theory that the USA government seeks to bolster the economy about 18 months out from an election, as employment is a key indicator of chance of electoral success for the incumbent government, and the bolstering usually needs 12 months to provide benefits for employment. This means, in his view, the stock market is bolstered over the same 4-6 month cycle, which is from about November to April (which was November last year to April this year in the current electoral cycle)
Robert ‘Rich Dad, Poor Dad’ Kiyosaki reckons Credit Suisse will be the next to fall:
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/silicon-valley-bank-collapse-wall-s…
The proof of a construction collapse keeps coming. I am sorry I can’t resist: ‘I told you so, suckers!’
https://www.oneroof.co.nz/news/43220
of course the Herald being the Herald, they cannot resist several attempts at spinning a positive narrative, lol
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