A review of things you need to know before you go home on Monday; Kiwibank raises mortgage rates, BNZ and ASB cut savings/TD rates, PSI expansion slows, Greens want population growth targets, swap rates raise, NZD sideways

BNZ has sliced -15 bps off its Personal OnCall account taking it down to 0.35%. It has also reduced its Total Money credit interest rates to just 0.10% (down from 0.15%) for amounts up to $100,000, and now only 0.35% for amounts above $100,000, a -15 bps reduction. It has made similar reductions to its Call account, but the 0.35% rate only applies to balances over $500,000.

Money for nothing - are bank liability owners (depositors) hair trigger poised to initiate a bank run regardless of the costs?

Australia’s new long bond could provide investors with a gain of more than 24 percent within its first six months if a prediction by Japan’s Asset Management One Co. proves correct. Read more

Who would be silly enough to commit time for paid work or money to business endeavours when government mandated central bank interest rate cuts offer such fantastic unearned income returns funded and underwritten by the taxpayer?

RBA report notes Australia & New Zealand Banking Group Ltd., Commonwealth Bank of Australia, National Australia Bank Ltd. and Westpac Banking Corp. -- known as the four pillars -- reported aggregate profit that was little changed in the latest half, after adjusting for a A$5 billion loss that NAB incurred on the sale of its U.K. subsidiary in February.

But
It said there had been some worsening of the performance of banks’ New Zealand exposures, particularly to the dairy industry.

“A sharp increase in the charge for bad and doubtful debts from low levels subtracted from profits as asset performance deteriorated across a number of portfolios,” the RBA said Read more

No wonder NZ bank depositors believe they are being unduly punished for poor bank officer lending decisions by banks' shareholders demanding corrective action.

Re soil moisture. I see that the farmers are now complaining that the ground is too wet. I think we should give them some money.

Same shite different country: I am not arguing that people be stopped from objecting to development. I am criticising the time and cost of planning indecisions. There’s a political theory to explain what has gone wrong, called “public choice theory”. It argues that people within public bodies may be partly motivated by the public good, but they are also — inevitably and not surprisingly — motivated by budget maximisation. The same is true for charities and pressure groups. And, for that matter, companies, but then everybody already knows that private firms are profit maximisers.

As C Northcote Parkinson might have put it (as an example of his eponymous law), the civil servant who delays a decision because he is inundated with protests, then pleads a backlog of work as a reason for needing a bigger budget and expanded team, is not being irrational; far from it. But nor is he taking decisions solely in the public interest. The protester whose actions lead to a goldmine of publicity and the besieged public servant who thereby gets a budget increase, and the lawyer who interrogates both in court — are all benefiting from delay.

If this government wants to govern it must grasp how this process works. The risk is not just that the state is ineffective but that it gets consumed. Like a caterpillar full of parasitic wasp larvae that will eat its vital organs last, Britain can still inch forward in the world economy despite its ridiculous planning system and its powerful protest industry. But not for ever. Somehow we have to rebalance the incentives in favour of faster and cheaper decision-making."

http://www.thetimes.co.uk/edition/comment/weve-become-a-nation-paralyse…