Here are the key things you need to know before you leave work today (or if you work from home, before you shutdown your laptop).
MORTGAGE RATE CHANGES
No changes to report today. All current mortgage rates are here. And note, you can compare mortgage offers with our new calculator that takes into account other costs and cashback incentives, here.
TERM DEPOSIT/SAVINGS RATE CHANGES
BNZ changed TD rates comprehensively today, including taking their five year offer to 4.40%. Welcome has also raised rates today. All updated term deposit rates less than 1 year are here, for 1-5 years, they are here.
RECORD SURGE
RBNZ data recorded a record surge in amount of mortgage money moving to fixed rates in December as homeowners digested November OCR announcement and then acted - decisively. Basically there has been a stampede of mortgage holders racing from floating to fixed.
NOT CHANGING
Cotality's Home Value Index monitoring reveals little movement in housing values at the start of the year as the national average dwelling value was down -0.1% in January.
FALLING
Total greenhouse gas emissions fell -1.1% in the September 2025 quarter, StatsNZ reported today. Other than the much lesser need to use fossil fuels for electricity generation, the largest decline was by the rural sector - again.
JANUARY 2026 AS WEAK AS JANUARY 2025
Worldline says consumer spending across core retailers in January was up slightly on the same month last year, but dips occurred on Wednesday, January 21, when extreme weather hit several regional areas, taking the top off the overall results.
KEEPING IT SHORTER
73% of all non-market bank funding (customer deposits) were on at call or less than 90 days, as at December 2025. This is the highest since April 2023. This ratio got down to 68.7% in between.
OUR QUIZ IS AVAILABLE FOR YOU
Our quiz has been updated for this week's edition. You can do it here. And a new one will be added every Monday.
NZX50 IN ANOTHER MINOR FIRMING
As at 3pm, the overall NZX50 index is little-changed so far today. That puts it up +0.9% over the past five working days. It is up +4.6% from six months ago. From a year ago it is now up +4.9%. Market heavyweight F&P Healthcare is down -0.5% so far today. Vista Group, Ryman, Skellerup, and Gentrack lead from the front as Heartland, Summerset, Kiwi Property, and Infratil are the big decliners in the NZX50.
GOLD (& FARMS) SAVES THE DAY
Australia recorded an actual merchandise trade surplus of +AU$6.7 bln in December, down -23% from the same month in 2024, taking the full 2025 surplus to +AU$45.0, which in turn was -33% lower than for all of 2024. Exports were $523.2 bln for the year, up only +1%. That gain was only possible because gold exports rose +65.8% to AU$60.9 bln for the full year. Rural exports rose +13.7% to AU$77.5 bln in 2025. Other mineral exports tanked
SWAP RATES DIP
Wholesale swap rates are probably lower again today. Keep an eye on our chart below which will record the final positions closer to 5pm. The 90 day bank bill rate was unchanged at 2.50% on Wednesday. Today, the Australian 10 year bond yield is down -3 bps at 4.85%. The China 10 year bond rate is unchanged at 1.81%. The Japanese 10 year bond is down -1 bp at 2.24 bps today. The NZ Government 10 year bond rate is down another -4 bps from this time yesterday, now at 4.55%. The RBNZ data is now 'prior day' with Wednesday's rate also down -4 bps at 4.56%. The UST 10yr yield is unchanged from this time yesterday, still at 4.27%.
EQUITIES MOSTLY LOWER
But the local equity market is little-changed in Thursday trade so far to end the week. The ASX200 is has dipped, down -0.2% in afternoon trade. Tokyo is little-changed in its opening trade. Hong Kong is down -1.2% today so far and Shanghai is down -0.6%. Singapore is down -0.3% at its open. Wall Street ended its Wednesday trade down -0.5%.
OIL HOLDS
The oil price in the US is unchanged from this time yesterday at just on US$64/bbl while the international Brent price is just under US$68.50/bbl.
CARBON PRICE HOLDS
There have been some good trades today on the secondary market and the price has held at $37.75/NZU and back near its early January levels. See our daily chart tracker of the NZU price for carbon, courtesy of emsTradepoint.
GOLD SLIPS
In early Asian trade, gold has fallen back from this time yesterday, down -US$65/oz from this time yesterday and now at US$4978/oz. Silver down -US$3, now at US$85/oz.
NZD EASES
The Kiwi dollar is down -40 bps against the USD at just on 60.1 USc although all this happened last night. Against the Aussie we are down -20 bps at 85.7 AUc. Against the euro we are down -30 bps at 50.8 euro cents. This all means the TWI-5 is now just on 63.6 and down -40 bps from yesterday..
BITCOIN SLIPS
The bitcoin price is now at US$72,080 and down another -5.5% from this time yesterday. Volatility has been high however at +/- 3.3%.
HOLIDAY
Friday, February 6, 2026 is a public holiday in New Zealand. We will not be publishing this update tomorrow. We will be back normally from Saturday.
Daily exchange rates
Select chart tabs
Daily swap rates
Select chart tabs
This soil moisture chart is animated here.
Keep abreast of upcoming events by following our Economic Calendar here ».
31 Comments
Spruikers be rolling in graves
Property apprentice is telling me to be quick.
With what I am seeing re moltbot - game has change this week big time AI EA going to replace Phillipines EA by xmas.
ok so looking at social media for ai agents
https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2026/02/03/moltbook-is-social-me…
you really should read this and see what ai agents talk to each other about, it feels a bit red dwarf.
But AI systems are increasingly talking to each other. Your customer service bot handles inquiries that come from vendor bots. Your scheduling assistant negotiates meeting times with client scheduling assistants. Your sales AI will eventually pitch to procurement AI before any human gets involved.
oh and if you are ignoring your AI agent it will simply call you on your mobile ... in any voice of any human you care to clone, totally NSFW
AI agents talking slop on Moltbook is not of interest yet. Luiza Jarovsky treats Moltbook less as a technical novelty and more as a warning signal: a visible manifestation of structural blind spots in current data protection and AI governance when AI agents interact at scale without clear human oversight and legal responsibility.
I hear you but like humans social media is spare time stuff , take a decent look at what these agents are doing for there owners , it’s jaw dropping
KPMG will be interesting. They're very much luddities at the senior partner level. A single, multi‑agent AI platform sits underneath KPMG’s client delivery tools: KPMG Digital Gateway (Tax), KPMG Velocity (Advisory), and KPMG Clara (Audit).
On the consulting side, it's not so easy. They're already relying on bots doing some of their research. Makes them look like clowns. Similarly with McKinsey, Deloitte, BCG, etc.
I have a friend that asked there ai agent to clone their voice from a certain actor from a certain genre that’s nsfw
law partners would love that
I saw the output of Claud this week review 1 million line GitHub repo against an internal security and auditing standard , who needs humans it was very good and almost free
Same thing when they invented the sowing machine right? Hard to know if AI will take our jobs or just create more, history would say the latter.
In early Asian trade, gold has fallen back from this time yesterday, down -US$65/oz from this time yesterday and now at US$4978/oz. Silver down -US$3, now at US$85/oz.
Silver prices crashed -22% in 2 hours not long after China mkts opened. Gold, rat poison, and crypto-crap all & getting smashed.
You gotta love the chaos.
Over the past decade JPMorgan paid about USD920 million dollars in fines for manipulating precious‑metal markets, then reportedly flipped from a large paper short to accumulating a very large physical silver position. Various long‑silver commentators now claim JPM controls on the order of 700-750 million ounces of physical silver and is “hoarding” metal while China’s export controls hit, framing this as a coordinated squeeze.
The conspiracy theory is that JPMorgan refused to deliver silver that Chinese counterparties believed they would receive, leaving those Chinese players “naked short” and turning this into a geopolitical supply‑chain narrative.
That sounds like a bet you cannot loose
Roll the wheel!
Will it be red or black, for risk on assets?
Or will risk appetite vanish for a time?
Growth, AI and redistribution.
Redistribution upwards.
Disney are hiking prices faster than inflation. Why? Because they want to sell to a growing number of rich people. There's no money being all things to all people.
Add in what a farce the White House is now, this is all heading one way.
"Disney are hiking prices faster than inflation. Why? Because they want to sell to a growing number of rich people. There's no money being all things to all people."
Disney are not long for this world then as the number with the required discretionary income is in decline (and accelerating)....and the farce in the WH will only further reduce their potential markets globally.
I don't think you got what I said
Disney know the population of people affording to be able to go at all is in decline.
But the number of monied people is trending up - they're what's propping up US consumer spending. I'm not talking middle class families.
I'm sure we will find out how temporary some of that money might be soon.
You appear correct....I do not comprehend
"Disney know the population of people affording to be able to go at all (?) is in decline.
But the number of monied people is trending up"
Yeah.
The average consumer is a lot poorer.
But the number of high wealth consumers is growing.
So rather than have their business appeal to the whole population, Disney know there's better money to be made offering a more premium experience to the wealthy subset of society. It's illustrative of a growing wealth divide.
Then once again....if Disney is targeting HNWI (exclusively) as its market, then I suggest they are not long for this world.
It is a volume product that seeks return from the minority of popular successes within a pool of costs.
Do you have any data to back that up? First page I clicked on was https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2025/median-weekly-earnings-were-1196-in-s…
Median weekly earnings of the nation's 121.5 million full-time wage and salary workers were $1,196 in the second quarter of 2025. This was 4.6 percent higher than a year earlier, compared with a gain of 2.4 percent in the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U) over the same period
Mark Zandi, chief economist at Moody's Analytics, said earlier this year that the richest 10% of Americans, those earning at least $250,000 a year, now account for half of all consumer spending. That's a record. Thirty years ago, the richest 10% accounted for 36% of all consumer spending.
https://www.reuters.com/markets/us/can-rich-continue-prop-up-us-consume…
And then there's a graph there showing since 2023 that low and middle income earners total consumer spending has been trending down, while wealthy consumers' spending has dramatically increased.
I suspect something similar has been occuring here.
I wonder if that’s because there’s nothing the average dude really needs or wants anymore. We will be mortgage free soon and significantly better off, but I can’t think of much I’ll spend it on, maybe go to the pub a bit more.
Declining Cash Reserves: Middle- and lower-income Americans are running out of disposable cash, with liquid assets for the bottom 80% falling 13% below projected paths.
Increased Financial Strain: The bottom 60% of households earn only 22.1% of all disposable income, yet require 39% to meet a minimal quality of life.
That makes little sense to me. If the median salary is $1200 a week, a household with 2 median earners gets roughly $200k NZ. There really should be a hell of a lot left over after core expenses.
In many places in the States, $1US gets you less than $1NZ in New Zealand. You can't just convert a US salary to NZD and expect it to be worth that much more in NZ purchasing power.
I thought food is much cheaper there? And housing. And petrol. And clothing. Pretty much all the core expenses. The commentators here keep saying the cost of living in NZ is much higher than other countries.
There are parts of the States where real estate is relatively cheap. But in many of the main metro areas (so where most people live), housing is super expensive, and there's taxes left right and centre. Food is about the same in USD as NZD, except maybe ultra processed crap.
They also have nicer stuff maybe? Even the poors will finance a new vehicle.
People on here thinking there's anything specifically bad about NZ compared to elsewhere could do with getting out a bit more.
I’d say their cost of living is roughly on par with here in NZD (with many factors such as location etc but that’s the same here too). So my argument above still holds, they should have plenty of discretionary spending money. I suspect they now include Disney / Netflix /Spotify / etc as a core expense, and the repayments on their brand new Tesla, etc. To me they are discretionary spending.
Dont forget health costs....and time limited benefits.
Much easier to fall off the treadmill
By the way, if you think food is on par, then our supermarkets are actually 15% cheaper as they have to add GST. So why are we threatening them and making them the bad guys?
Speaking to family in the States the last few days and all of them are in the process of applying for NZ citizenship/residency for their spouses and children.
You know things are not nice globally when Americans want to get here more than someone from India.
Is it genuine or just the usual rhetoric? Has life for an average US family really changed much?
They can't see the current trajectory reversing, and the level of public tension is only ratcheting.
To hazard a guess, I'd imagine they realise that the level of public mobility and motivation for change has to be so great to overcome the current status quo govt, that it seems insurmountable and they would rather their efforts go to mobilising elsewhere so they don;t have to bear the civil unrest required for change to occur on a grand scale.
We welcome your comments below. If you are not already registered, please register to comment
Remember we welcome robust, respectful and insightful debate. We don't welcome abusive or defamatory comments and will de-register those repeatedly making such comments. Our current comment policy is here.