A review of things you need to know before you go home on Thursday; huge increased spending for Akl infrastructure; more real estate agents despite fewer sales, Kiwibank gets new boss; swap rates up, NZD down

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

MORTGAGE RATE CHANGES
Nothing to report today.

TERM DEPOSIT RATE CHANGES
NZCU Baywide tweaked their 5 month rate.

BIG PROBLEMS, BIG SPENDING
The big economic news of the day is the 'new' $28 bln decision to "invest in Auckland transport infrastructure". You can read the Plan in detail here, or our summary here. Regular readers will know we try to keep track of all these major Auckland projects, and today's new ones have pushed the totals to well over $50 bln. That is a huge pipeline of impending construction work. Some will be funded from Auckland Council resources, some from new taxes (the regional fuel tax), some from central Government. In the end, the real source of all this money are taxpayers.

A GROWING IMBALANCE
As at March, there were 15,955 real estate agents licensed to work in New Zealand. That number includes 1,906 "agents", 389 "branch managers" and 12,726 "salespersons". 931 "companies" are also registered. All up, this is +3.7% more than a year ago. In Auckland, the total is 7,055 or 44% of the national total. But the Auckland numbers grew very little. These numbers are growing despite sales volumes falling -14.4% nationally and down -20.0% in Auckland. Auckland accounted for just 29% of all sales even though they have 44% of all agents. While it is true it has long been the case where a minority of agents do the majority of the business, these trends indicate a growing imbalance.

DYNAMIC NEW BOSS
Kiwibank has a new chief executive. Steve Jurkovich, who oversaw strong growth of ASB's rural and corporate lending, will succeed Paul Brock who was apparently shown the door after a series of unfortunate and expensive stumbles - and two new state-owned cornerstone shareholders in the NZ Super Fund, and ACC.

INVESTOR LOAN GROWTH CAP TO GO
The Australian Prudential Regulation Authority said it plans to remove its investor loan growth benchmark and replace it with more permanent measures to strengthen lending standards. The 10% benchmark on investor loan growth was introduced in 2014 as part of a range of actions to reduce higher risk lending and improve practices. Since then they claim banks have "improved the quality of lending, raise standards and increase capital resilience".

KEEP OLD MEN OFF BIKES
Someone sent me this link. Perhaps it was a warning ...

FRIENDLY LOAN CO, UNFRIENDLY COLLECTION AGENCY
Payday loan operators offer debt at very high effective cost rates on a per annum basis. The key to getting people to sign up is to make it easy to apply. Often the business case of the credit provider is centered around a good proportion of borrowers being unable to pay on time, generating lucrative fee income. We warned about the risks in this article. And we built a popular calculator to ensure readers know upfront what the effective cost of debt is. Now we hear that there is a new strategy to get people to take out such loans - ATM-like machines in retail malls. Because they seem to be targeting naive and vulnerable shoppers, perhaps we need official intervention to prevent harm.

BENCHMARK INTEREST RATES RISE
Local swap rates rose today following Wall Street higher. The two year is up +2 bps, the five year is up +3 bps, and the ten year is up +4 bps. The UST 10yr yield is now at 3.02%, down -1 bp after Wall Street closed. The Aussie Govt 10 yr is now at 2.87% (up +2 bps). The China 10 yr is up +5 bps to 3.63%. The NZ Govt 10 yr is up +2 bp at 2.94%. The 90 day bank bill rate slipped another -1 bp to 2.03% today.

BITCOIN SLIPS
The bitcoin price has slipped today and is now at US$8,825 which is down -2% from this time this morning.

NZ DOLLAR HOLDS LOWER
The NZD slid significantly yesterday but that has stopped now and we are at 70.7 USc. We are also marginally weaker on the cross rates where we at 93.3 AUc and at 58.1 euro cents. That has the TWI-5 down to 72.6 and its lowest level in 2018. Some analysts think this new level is more realistic.

This chart is animated here. For previous users, the animation process has been updated and works better now.