A review of things you need to know before you go home on Monday; Lending Crowd cuts loan rates, housing market buoyant; ANZ pays penalty, equity market turmoil; swaps sink, NZD lower, & more

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

MORTGAGE RATE CHANGES
None to report today.

TERM DEPOSIT RATE CHANGES
Update: ANZ has ended its eight month special rate of 2.80% (reverting to 2.65%) and cut -10 bps from its one year rate, taking ity back to 2.60%.

LENDING CROWD GOES LOWER AGAIN
Lending Crowd have reduced their peer-to-peer interest rates. At the highest credit standards the reduction is -20 bps for a three year loan and -40 bps for five years. For lower credit standards some of the reductions are much more substantial, up to -260 bps for B1 grade on a five year loan. Lending Crowd's retail : wholesale funding split is 96% : 4%. They claim very low default rates. SME loans carry rates +50 bps higher than personal loans, but for A1 Credit grade that is still less than 7%.

BOUYANT, BUT ...
The February housing market remains buoyant. New listings are up and average asking prices are on the rise but total housing stock available for sale remains tight.

A PEAK, BUT DOWNHILL FROM HERE?
New Zealand's terms of trade hit a record high at the end of 2019, surpassing the previous high at December 2017 and the June 1973 historic high. This latest peak was driven by high protein prices whereas oil and vehicle import prices have declined. They may decline further in the first quarter of 2020, but it is almost certain our export prices will fall more sharply.

TRAVEL BAN EXTENDED BY 7 DAYS
Update: The Government has extended its travel ban preventing people from China and Iran from coming to New Zealand. The ban has been extended from March 3 to March 10. Travellers from Northern Italy and South Korea will also be required to self-isolate for 14 days and register with Healthline.

SNEAK PEEK
Based on the yeoman work at Massey University's Albany campus, we are now offering the key charts that make up their GDP Live on our service. You can check them out here. We will be launching formally later in the week. It is a project many readers will appreciate. GDP results are released about 80 days after the end of each quarter. But the AI team at Massey have access to a huge range of official and unofficial data and using machine learning have a model that now gives a close growth result well before the StatsNZ release.

BIG PENALTY
ANZ NZ to pay customers more than $35 mln after admitting a breach of its responsible lending obligations in relation to a coding error within a loan calculator. This is the largest monetary settlement ever for the Commerce Commission. It was an issue with an internal ANZ loan calculator between June 2015 and May 2016 that meant some interest to be charged to customers was left out when calculating their repayments or loan term. More than 100,000 personal and home loan customers were affected. The $35 mln penalty represents 1.9% of ANZ's tax-paid profits in the year to September 2019 and were all provided for in those accounts..

QUADRUPLING
The latest compilation of Covid-19 data is here. There are now 8558 cases outside China, a rise of +1796 in one day. A week ago that outside-China number was 2208 so it has almost quadrupled in a week. That's all based on the official data, but false negatives, and China not counting asymptomatic positives (and Iran hardly counting anything), make all this data suspect. We have now pushed though 3000 deaths worldwide (and almost all of them in Hubei Province, China).

EQUITY MARKET UPDATES
The NZX50 Capital Index is now down -2.5% from Friday's close, which is less than the -3.2% drop it opened with. The ASX200 is down -1.8% in early trade. Tokyo opened lower, then turned higher and now up +0.5%. Shanghai has opened up +1.6% and Hong Kong opened up 0.2%. Tomorrow's Wall Street reaction will be "interesting" to say the least.

LOCAL SWAP RATES DOWN VERY HARD, YET AGAIN
Earlier today, wholesale swap rates sank up to -20 bps across the curve, but some of that has been pared back subsequently. At present, the two year is down to just 0.69% and down -17 bps from Friday. The five year rate is down -15 bps to 0.77%, and the ten year down -13 bps to 1.07%. These are all record lows, dipping below the previous benchmark set in October 2019. The 90-day bank bill rate is also down very sharply, down -19 bps to 0.87% in anticipation of central bank rate cuts. In Australia, their swap rates are marginally higher with most market players not expecting a rate cut tomorrow by the RBA and most of their fall coming on Friday. The Aussie Govt 10yr is sharply lower at 0.71%, down -15 bps from Friday. The China Govt 10yr is also soft at 2.76% and down -5 bps. The NZ Govt 10 yr yield is lower too, down -10 bps at 0.97%. And the UST 10yr yield has reached a new record low, now at 1.10% and another -3 bps fall from where it closed on Friday. Remember, this time last week the UST 10yr was at 1.38%.

NZ DOLLAR SINKS
The Kiwi dollar has slipped further, now at 62.3 USc and -½c lower than this time on Friday. Against the Aussie we are lower at 95.6 AUc. Against the euro we are much lower at 56.3 euro cents. That means the TWI-5 is now lower at under 67.9, a -100 bps drop since Friday.

BITCOIN SLIPS
Bitcoin is down -4% today from Friday at US$8,522 although most of that happened over the weekend. The bitcoin price is charted in the currency set below.

This chart is animated here.

The easiest place to stay up with event risk today is by following our Economic Calendar here ».

Our exchange rate chart is here.