What happened Friday

A review of things you need to know before you go home on Friday; RaboDirect and Kiwibank cut rates, low yields spreading, swap rates fall, wholesale trade healthy

5th Dec 14, 4:00pm by David Chaston

For Friday, December 5, 2014. <a href="http://www.shutterstock.com/">Image sourced from Shutterstock.com</a>

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

TODAY'S MORTGAGE RATE CHANGES
Kiwibank has announced cuts to 4 and 5 year home loan rates that will be effective on Monday. Basically they are just meeting the market.

TODAY'S DEPOSIT RATE CHANGES
RaboDirect has reduced rates across the board.

A HEALTHY CLIP
Q3 wholesale trading activity grew +4.3% from the same period a year go, but that was down from +5.9% in Q2. Wholesale stocks however flat-lined with growth of only +1.2%. Maybe sales are outpacing the ability to build inventories.

LOW YIELDS SPREADING
Commercial property yields are sinking. We reported some today as low a 3%.

A PROFESSIONAL SPRUCE-UP
Remember the institute of Chartered Secretaries? Well it has just had a name change to Governance New Zealand. “Our members provide specialist skills and technical knowledge to Boards and Directors in their role as company secretary, legal advisor, auditor, risk and compliance manager, or senior executive."

WHOLESALE RATES
Swap rates slipped today -2 bps across nearly the whole curve. The 90 day bank bill rate rose 1 bp today to 3.68%.

OUR CURRENCY HOLDS
Check our real-time charts here. The NZ dollar held on to its small recent gains today. It is now still at 77.7 USc, at 92.7 AUc, and the TWI is at 78.3

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

Daily exchange rates

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Source: RBNZ

Source: CoinDesk

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4 Comments

by MortgageBelt | 5th Dec 14, 6:20pm 1417756853

As I have been advising for the last 5 years, there are only important things to know about interest rates:

These 3 trends are: Cuts, Cuts and Cuts.

Interest rates will not be "hiking" for a very long time. We are in a new post-GFC environment, with deflation, QE, ZIRP in many countries, global imbalances, and NZ will not be operating disconnected from all these influences - despite our Rockstar economy.

by Alter Ego | 5th Dec 14, 9:26pm 1417767993

You "forgot" John Key has finally recognised that we may actually need a register of who owns what and from where the real money comes from, over sales of housing in New Zealand, in response to the public clamour.

How strange, but better late than never. Maybe he has learnt to pay attention to his voters.

Also you "forgot" that Christchurch also has to sell "Ratepayer assets" as they seem to be under insured, though the second most over paid Council in the Country.

How remiss we were in thinking that the Council also had this in hand. What a waste of rate payers money, twice over. Poor Christchurch, yet again!!.

by Grant A | 5th Dec 14, 11:12pm 1417774322

Years and years of being wrong - one year there will be a cut, in fact more than one.......right but years wrong is just plain bloody WRONG

by MortgageBelt | 5th Dec 14, 11:44pm 1417776294

Banks have made a lot of money by 'predicting' rate hikes every year since 2008, & influencing their customers to fix at higher rates.

Since the GFC there has been nothing but a downward then flat trend in interest rates. - as it will stay for some time.

2008/9 massive cuts

2009 Cuts

2010/11 Sligh hike then back down after Chch quake

2011 flat

2012. Flat

2013 flat

2014. 4 tentative hikes in OCR then cuts in fixed rates

2015 flat