A review of things you need to know before you go home on Thursday; 'keep him in', online sales strong, Auckland sellers keen, Fonterra worried about stocks, swaps up

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

TODAY'S MORTGAGE RATE CHANGES
There are no changes to report today.

TODAY'S DEPOSIT RATE CHANGES
NZCU South and HSBC both cut term deposit rates with the HSBC reductions across all terms, -10 to -25 bps.

TRYING TO KEEP PETRICEVIC BEHIND BARS
The Sensible Sentencing Trust says it has filed proceedings in the High Court at Wellington seeking a judicial review of the Parole Board's decision granting "serial fraudster" Rod Petricevic early parole after serving less than half his six years and 10 months sentence. The ex-Bridgecorp managing director is due out of prison on Monday, September 7.

BUYERS KEEN DESPITE RISING PRICES
Total online retail spending in July was up 13% compared to July 2014 levels. Spending at international sites is continuing to run at levels much higher than a year ago, with spending up 25% on July last year.  Like last month, part of this increase reflects higher prices due to falls in the New Zealand dollar. The NZD was down 24% against the US dollar and 16% against the UK pound, compared to July 2104. Growth in online spending at local merchants dropped back into single digits in July, with sales up 5% on the levels a year earlier. 

SELLERS KEEN
New listings are way up but prices and the number of homes being sold dipped slightly in August for Barfoot & Thompson, Auckland's dominant realtor. Also worrying for Barfoots, their dropout rate rose to 23.3%, the highest we have seen since our data on this started in 2001. (The dropout rate tracks the listings that get withdrawn after not resulting in a sale. That rate has averaged 14% over the past two years.) Sellers seem to be rushing to get their capital gains ahead of a sense that the market is topping out.

STOCK STRESS
Fonterra has acknowledged to international media offshore that its inventories are uncomfortably high. It sees "customer supply chains quite full" and says it will take "several months to deplete inventories".

INCHING DOWN
Gross government debt fell to $77.6 bln at the end of August, down by -$0.5 bln with the repayment of short-term Treasury bills. Despite -$0.5 bln being a very big number, this doesn't really alter the gross debt levels much at all.

CONSTRUCTION BOOM SPREADS
Total building work put in place rose +1.6% in the June quarter, taking the level of building activity to its highest level in ten years. June's increase in building work was underpinned by a +5% increase in non-residential construction. This offset a -1% decline in residential construction. It is now five years since the first of the devastating earthquakes that struck the Canterbury region.

CROWD FADES
Raising equity on crowd funding platforms got very difficult in August; only two of four offers succeeded, only one would have made the promoter happy.

NO MORE DEBT REMISSION
The tax law is to be changed scrapping debt remission provisions between related parties. The problem has been that when debt remission has been agreed between a debtor and creditor, the debtor has been assessed a taxable gain. This is often a tough and unintended outcome in a family situation.

SMART IDEAS
The Government has today allocated another almost $100 mln for public R&D projects. The successful research proposals cover diverse areas, including medical implants, insecticides, 3D printing, dairy goat infant formula, dental diagnostics, sensors, self-cleaning ceramic coatings, waterproof roads, family violence prevention and aquifer management. Of the funding, almost $5-0 mln over the next four years has been awarded to research in the environmental and biological fields. There is also $46 mln for areas of high-value manufacturing, energy and minerals, hazards and infrastructure, and "health and society".

STRONGER CORE FUNDING
Bank core funding is now at its highest level ever (at least, since the monitoring started in April 2010). In total, the 14 locally incorporated banks now have 88.0% of their total loans and advances funded by the items the RBNZ describes as core funding. That is $292 bln of core funding for loans and advances of $332 bln. This is only the second time ever that the difference has been below $40 bln.

SHAKY WEST ISLAND
Australia's July trade deficit was a lot lower than expected. On the other hand July retail sales fell.

WHOLESALE RATES UP
Swap rates rose in a steepening bias from +2 bps at one and two years to +4 bps for ten years. The 90 day bank bill rate went up as well, up +2 bps to 2.90%.

NZ DOLLAR SLIPS
The NZ dollar traded today within a very narrow range. It is still at 63.6 USc, at 90.6 AUc and 56.7 euro cents. The TWI-5 is still at 68.2. Check our real-time charts here.

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