Here's our summary of key economic events overnight that affect New Zealand, with news that as global price pressures ease, we may be starting to see a wage-price surge locally.
But first, the American housing market is continuing its measured rise with a surprise rise in February pending home sales. You may recall they rose more than +8% year-on-year in January, and analysts thought February would give back about -2.3% of that. But in fact they rose again, by +0.8%, and locking in the gains. It is the Northeast where the big gains are coming from; the West remains weak. It's a recovery of transaction volume at this stage, not in prices, where the median remained at US$363,000 (NZ$583,000).
This gain in real estate volume may well have carried on into March. Mortgage applications rose +2.9% last week, a fourth consecutive week of increases, and the longest winning streak in four years. Mortgage interest rates were little-changed with the benchmark 30yr fixed rate at 6.45% plus points, but that is a one-month low.
Singapore reported that their producer prices are deflating fast now, down -4.7% in February on top of a -1.5% drop in January from the same month a year ago.
In Thailand, their central bank raised its policy rate by +25 bps to 1.75%. They are reporting a good recovery and a growing economy. Their rate increase is part of their 'normalisation' program.
Yet another survey reported that German consumer sentiment is improving, extending the trend to six consecutive months.
But in Russia, retail sales are sharply lower (-7.8%), as is industrial production (-1.7%). Both sets of data are worse in February than January.
Although it is not expected to have much impact on trade flows, the CPTPP eleven nation trade group is expected to agree that the UK can join. You may recall that both Taiwan and China have also applied, but they will be caught up in the global political rivalry. The CPTPP is the high-standard trade bloc promoted by the US Obama Administration, but was abandoned by the Trump Administration. However, even without the US it is doing an effective job raising trade deal standards especially labour and environmental standards. Even China's preferred RCEP looks up to the CPTPP.
In Australia, their inflation rate is moderating, although it remains very high. Their CPI rose 6.8% in the year to February, easing from a 7.4% gain in the year to January. This was less than the 7.1% expected and was the second straight month of lower annual inflation and the softest pace since last June. The easing is largely due to slower rises in prices of housing, food, and transport. Financial markets were pricing virtually no change to the RBA cash rate at next week's review, and may be vindicated by this CPI update. But ANZ says it thinks the RBA will hike by +25 bps again next week because inflation is "still too high". New Zealand won't get its March CPI update until April 20.
But whether Aussie inflation continues to moderate is still up in the air. Their unions seem ready to push for big +7% wage claims in cost-of-living campaigns at both state and national levels, and in both the public and private sectors.
Tallies of funding activity in international financial markets shows that Australian banks are having no problems raising money. All recent issues (especially by ANZ, CBA and NAB) have been heavily over-subscribed, enabling them to have raised most of their 2023 requirements already. International investors seem to prize Aussie banks for their "unquestionably strong" capital benchmarks.
The UST 10yr yield starts today at 3.56%, up +2 bps from yesterday. The UST 2-10 rate curve is little-changed at -51 bps. Their 1-5 curve inversion is unchanged -89 bps. And their 30 day-10yr curve is only marginally more inverted at -58 bps. The Australian ten year bond is down -2 bps at 3.33%. The China Govt ten year bond is unchanged at 2.88%. And the New Zealand Govt ten year is starting today up at 4.19%. That is a +7 bps rise.
Wall Street is on the up, with the S&P500 tracking a +1.0% rise in late Wednesday trade. Overnight, European markets were equally positive and up +1.2% across the board. Yesterday Tokyo ended its Wednesday session up +1.3%. Hong Kong was up +2.1%, but Shanghai ended down another -0.2%. The ASX200 ended up a minor +0.2%, but the NZX50 fell -0.3% in its Wednesday trade although that was after a late recovery.
The price of gold will open today at US$1965/oz and down -US$5 from this time yesterday.
And oil prices start today unchanged from yesterday at just over US$73.50/bbl in the US. The international Brent price is now just on US$78/bbl.
The Kiwi dollar is down -¼c against the USD and now at 62.2 USc. Against the Aussie we are little-changed at 93.1 AUc. Against the euro we are also little-changed at 57.5 euro cents. That means the TWI-5 is now at 70.2 with a minor -10 bps daily dip.
The bitcoin price is much higher today, now at US$28,246 and up +5.0% from this time yesterday. Volatility over the past 24 hours has been high too at +/-3.5%.
The easiest place to stay up with event risk today is by following our Economic Calendar here ».
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69 Comments
Nothing a few carbon credits and virue signals won't sort out.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2023-03-29/nickel-revolution-ha…
"And this giant chemistry experiment comes with environmental consequences. Compared with more traditional methods, HPAL produces nearly double the amount of tailings that need to be treated and stored, raising the risk of severe contamination as all sides rush to capture battery spoils. The power to process this green ingredient still mostly comes from coal.
...Harita presses the water out of its waste slurry then stacks the dry soil in former mining sites, but there’s not enough space. Its mines contain enough laterite ores to keep the HPAL facility busy for 17 years. Its dry-stacking area could accommodate just six years worth of waste, and even that’s optimistic in a high-rainfall tropical region, says Wood Mackenzie’s Durrant: “There is no such thing as dry stacking in a wet environment.”
The company proposes building a dam for tailings, bypassing the dry-pressing machine and letting the sun dry the waste slurry. But that presents its own problems. The troubled Goro mine in New Caledonia curtailed output after a leak from its tailings dam in November. And there are few easy alternatives — Ramu, the plant that inspired Harita, disposes of its tailings in the sea, a controversial practice banned in Indonesia, where seas tend to be shallow."
Yeah right! They import the dirtiest fuel to produce the 'clean and green' electricity. Which makes no sense that we aren't even using our own resource
In the news this week, A recent poll in the traditionally anti-nuclear Denmark showed widespread support for a nuclear reactor to be built on Danish soil, particularly amongst young people
No, you weren't.
(I will retract that statement if you supply references.)
The glaciers are retreating, here and globally; the planet as a whole is indeed warming. But weather events, because of the (heat) energy increase, are becoming more intense and more frequent; that intensity can produce polar-originated blasts. Don't conflate the two.
Many folk start from a vested-interest bias, and tell their tales from that starting-point. That leads to trouble; better to base personal narratives on a factual baseline.
Plenty of climate change experts said the ski industry was finished. Just embarrassing for the chicken little crowd.
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/13/us/climate-change-threatens-ski-indu…
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/20/travel/ski-season-snow-records.html
https://www.heraldsun.com.au/blogs/andrew-bolt/warmists-predicted-no-sn…
When I see the arborists using their incredibly noisy petrol or diesel powered chippers to process all of the wood that they take away I shake my head. And most of it is then carted away in a diesel truck and put on some garden bed somewhere miles away.
If there was a climate emergency I doubt that you would do that!
I'd imagine that these current proposals to deal with slash would be similar greenwashing.
For it not to be I'd say you would need electric logging trucks, electric chippers and electric trucks again to wherever the boilers are. Is that the proposal? I doubt it.
Me: I have trees on my section. I use a hand saw to cut the branches down. And an axe to process it. Plus a pile on my section for the leaves to decompose. Then I burn the wood in my wood burner in winter. A completely different process.....
I read a paper years ago that proposed we go to 24v.
so much of the electricity being used in homes is passing through a transformer that reduces voltage.the little box bit on all our electrical cables.appliances have them too but they are hidden inside.
led lights suit lower voltages
we basically waste a lot of electricity and turn it into heat.the paper went into detail about the massive infrastructure cost savings
nz needs to get innovative.we have a fantastic renewable energy resource if we use it wisely
Switch mode power supplies are very efficient, they were probably talking about old tech transformer based wall warts, yes, they are very inefficient.
And you can't convert your whole house to 24V supply, things like the hot water cylinder, heat pump, stove, dryer, fridge etc would draw hundreds of amps, and become rather inefficient.
You might be able to make a case for a house to be supplied 230v from the street and have a single high efficiency 24v power supply , and the have two lots of wiring inside, 230v for high powered stuff, and a 24v system for small devices, but I doubt it would stack up in reality, and the retrofit costs to existing houses mean it would take multiple decades to happen.
Whoever wrote that is living in lala land.
I think you misunderstood that paper. The lines losses at 24V (DC?) would be so large it would be incomparable to the minor efficiency losses of using cheap transformers at or close to location. Maybe they just wanted a dedicated 24V DC system that was converted at a centrally located supply in you house for lighting and USB wall sockets?
And how would a central 24V transformer save us from losses?
Wouldn't be surprised if it increased losses - as the efficiency of a transformer depends how much current you are pulling through it.
With individual transformers they can be specced so that they are most efficient at the typical power demand of the indivdual device. With a central transformer you'd never be in it's peak efficiency zone.
I was trying to make the paper work, somehow. (I would guess there was more to this paper.) If it's just for wall usb sockets and lighting you would know the max load when you installed the supply.
If you had a dc supply in the roof between your kitchen, dining and living rooms, the cable runs might just be short enough you don't lose too much. The power draw of modern LEDs is so low no one would care about a couple of percent savings anyway.
The real advantages would be if you install a central lighting controller so you do flash things like change the lighting colour temps after sunset, dim the lights late at night, turn off empty rooms and maybe turn the lights on slowly to give your eyes time to adjust if you get up in the middle of the night.
I have electrified everything. I already have an electric chipper but this can only process branches upto 50mm using a standard household supply (2.4kW).
The Ford F150 Lightning currently on sale in the US can deliver 9.6kW of power for tools. Future commercial trucks will be able to do much more. So it will happen but it will take a while to replace the existing fleet.
Would be interesting to be around in say50 years time, when electric vehicles have replaced the by then banned fossil fuelled ones, to observe warfare such as presently Ukraine vs Russia, going at each other in electric tanks or are military considerations and equipment excluded from the relative global undertakings?
War is always over resources, which take energy to obtain. War is the bringing of more energy to the arena; bigger projectiles thrown further, faster and more often.
https://www.counterpunch.org/2018/10/01/1918-how-the-allies-surfed-to-v…
We won't see electric tanks, the descent will be too fast. Einstein was probably right.
US are developing electromagnetic rail guns PDK. Very powerful with a huge range and kinetic punch. Someone will be looking at scaling down a nuke power pack for military vehicle use to reduce the reliance on a logistics train (they can't eliminate it), and to provide the power so EM rail guns can be mounted on them too.
Otherwise the next war will be about resources. Putin's one isn't despite what some say. It's about territory and ego.
The Ukraine war is actually about Russia trying to secure its borders. Every military conflict they have been involved in for the last 20-30 years has been about this. Its easy to drive a tank across flat ground to Moscow, difficult to drive one over a mountain to Moscow. Russia is trying to extend its borders to incorporate defensible terrain.
Russia's borders were secure. Neither any country of Europe nor NATO had any expansionist aspirations. If there was a potential threat to Russia is was from China.
The western worlds aspirations for Russia were for it to become a successful functioning democracy, fully trading and interacting with the world, peacefully. the same with China. No doubt some US (or other) corporations would have had greedy eyes on some of their resources, but in the end the goal was peaceful trade. It is idealistic, but none the less that was it.
- Mongol invasion of Kievan Rus' (1237–1242), a series of invasions that resulted in the Rus' states becoming vassals of the Golden Horde.
- Livonian campaign against Rus' (1240–1242), an unsuccessful Teutonic invasion of the Novgorod and Pskov Republics, in order to convert them to Catholicism.
- Russo-Crimean Wars (1570–1572), an Ottoman invasion that penetrated Russia and destroyed Moscow.
- Polish–Muscovite War (1609–1618), Poland gained Severia and Smolensk.
- Ingrian War (1610–1617), a Swedish invasion which captured Novgorod and Pskov.
- Swedish invasion of Russia (1708–1709), an unsuccessful Swedish invasion, as part of the Great Northern War (1700–1721).
- French invasion of Russia (1812), an unsuccessful invasion by Napoleon's French Empire and its allies, as part of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815).
- Crimean War (1853–1856), a series of conflicts between the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, the French Empire, Sardinia, and the Russian Empire, including an Allied invasion of the Crimean Peninsula.
- Japanese invasion of Sakhalin (1905), an invasion and annexation by the Japanese, as part of the Russo-Japanese War (1904–1905).
- Eastern Front (World War I) (1914–1918), Russia was forced to cede Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states to Germany as the Russian Empire collapsed.
- Caucasus campaign (1914–1918), a series of conflicts between the Russian Empire, its various successor states, and the Ottoman Empire during World War I.
- Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War (1918–1925) and the contemporaneous Polish–Soviet War (1918/9–1921), the Polish occupation of Belarus and West Ukraine.
- Japanese intervention in Siberia (1918–1922), an occupation of the Russian Far East by Japanese soldiers during the Russian Civil War (1917–1923).
- Operation Barbarossa (1941), an unsuccessful invasion of the Soviet Union led by Nazi Germany that started the Eastern Front (World War II) of 1941–1945.
- Continuation War (1941–1944), an unsuccessful German-Finnish invasion of the Soviet Union, as part of World War II.
- Kantokuen (1941), an aborted plan for a major Japanese invasion of the Russian Far East during World War II.
- Operation Unthinkable (1945), a proposed contingency plan for an Anglo-American invasion of the Soviet Union developed by the British Chiefs of Staff during the later stages of World War II.
- War of Dagestan (1999), a repulsed Chechen invasion of Dagestan.
The west saying that there was no threat is one thing. If your enemy is telling you that they are no threat to you do you believe them?
I have no doubt that there was no threat to Russia from the West but is that what they believe based on history and NATO influence in the area?
Well now that is the best contribution I have read here since day one. Thanks. So much of today has been born out of yesterday for centuries stacked on centuries. Ignore history and you are an ignoramus. To add a little, The Winter War 1939, Russian invasion of Finland would have been avoided if Finland had met Stalin’s request for an enforced demilitarised border zone that would have taken Leningrad out of artillery range. Out all of that conflict, and Finland subsequently allying itself with Nazi Germany, that territory is now within Russia. Finland is actually accordingly, most fortunate that Stalin did not seek post WW2, to envelop all of Finland, as per other states, behind the iron curtain.
https://truthout.org/articles/the-ukraine-mess-that-nuland-made/
Read and learn, Murray; note the date....
And the Nuland/Kagan cabal are about? Same thing they were about in Iraq.
Not quite right. If it would be only about bigger bang than nukes would have settled the matter months ago.
Lots of kit already fully electrified. UA uses drones for recon & airstrikes with most of them being re-chargable, even some kamikaze drones use a battery as it's much cheaper to blow up than a ICE component.
They also use electric motorbikes / pedelecs for silent short range missions that require increased mobility.
The big stuff obviously is all run by dino-juice, one reason is the age of the systems. The NATO stuff is mostly upgraded tech from the 70s.
DARPA is running projects on providing renewable & independent energy to the battlefield.
The future of warfare lies in using energy in a smarter way e.g. small cheap drones / loitering munitions taking out ammo depots, aircraft, ships, tanks which are by a factor of several millions more expensive to replace.
To deal with an oversized enemy infantry you either use more of the above, tanks or we'll start seeing autonomous armed vehicles / robots doing the dirty work.
Yes, "electric tanks" firing depleted uranium, having a good cookoff when their batteries get hit and needing a big generator to recharge the batteries after the electric grid has been taken out. This would tough to beat for climate hypocrisy.
Banning billionaires from flying in gas powered private jets might be something more achievable in the next 50 years.
https://www.zerohedge.com/political/implausibility-net-zero-carbon-ener…
The Implausibility Of A Net Zero Carbon Energy Future Is Now Obvious
Not a coherent piece.
The problems are very simple; the current societal construct is reliant on high-quality energy (compact, transportable). We stepped our way up - wood, coal, oil - to the best. We then burned the best of the best. Now we're well down the sequence of reducing quality, and there's a cross-over point where we cannot underwrite all future expectations. I suggest we are well past that, and pretending.
Yes, we will end up running on renewable energy, fossil fuels being finite and doubling-time being what it is. Yes, it is do-able, but not supporting anything approaching BAU; society will look very, very different. Its not whether we go to electric everything in seamless replacement - we won't - but what we can maintain, what we have to triage, and what we should build. Always remember that ex fossil energy, no city got bigger than 1 million. How many are in short-term trouble, as those leave us?
https://www.commondreams.org/news/billionaire-bailout-fdic-svb
In prepared testimony for a Senate Banking Committee hearing slated for Tuesday morning, the chair of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation reveals that the 10 largest deposit accounts at Silicon Valley Bank held a combined $13.3 billion, a detail that's likely to intensify criticism of federal regulators' intervention in the firm's recent collapse.
"At SVB, the depositors protected by the guarantee of uninsured depositors included not only small and mid-size business customers but also customers with very large account balances," FDIC chief Martin Gruenberg writes in his prepared testimony. "The ten largest deposit accounts at SVB held $13.3 billion, in the aggregate."
Gruenberg goes on to estimate that the FDIC's $125 billion Deposit Insurance Fund (DIF)—which is financed primarily by assessments on insured banks and "backed by the full faith and credit of the United States government"—took a $20 billion hit as a result of the SVB intervention.
I wonder who those 10 depositors were and how well connected they are? $20 billion FDIC bail out and most of it goes to 10 depositors. How much of a systemic risk was it really?
The COL payments impact on inflation is almost going to be hilarious (if it wasnt so predictable years ago, and frightening)
So lets recap...
1. The government and reserve bank print money and lend it too cheaply and give it out freely for far too long, creating too much demand and pushing up prices and causing much of the current massive inflation.
2. Now to bring down inflation the reserve bank raises interest rates. To deliberately reduce spending (reduce demand = lower prices) and cause some unemployment (to reduce wage pressure by increasing worker choice for employers... accepting all this will likely cause a recession .. but considering it more important to kill inflation).
3. To counter the reserve banks strategy - our government has noted that people now dont have enough to spend so they cleverly starts to give everyone (via benefits, pensions, teacher and health salaries) more money to spend.
😂😭😂 genius.
So new we can repeat steps 2 and 3 until we need to repeat step 1 ... and so on... until we are in zimbabwe
I suspect we need to give both main parties a lesson in economics 101.
Ironically, no.
It was blind belief in Econ 101 which led them to where they are.
Money is how we displace each other from the front of the queue. Globally, Zimbabwe was forced to the back; don't blame Mugabe; he's a symptom not a cause. As is/was their rampant devaluation.
Econ 101 assumes there can be enough for everybody; that statement being unlimited. That's just plain wrong, as we're seeing....
PDK you may be an Econ 101 expert, African politics I am not so sure about
Definitely Mugabe is to blame - at the very least partly. I say wholly - He failed Politics 101, put his own and cronies interests ahead of the country and its people, beat and murdered citizens, allowed corruption to flourish and effectively destroyed a bread basket country where there was enough for everybody
Chicken/egg.
When the First World clobbers the Third, it often does so via getting those countries into an unrepayable amount of debt (as it did to post-Smith Rhodesia). We make them repay the debt, by extracting and selling to us (at our price) their resources. The result is little more than slave labour at arm's length (as per Congo). Since WW2, the IMF and the World Bank have been the common vehicles.
But the debts can never be repaid - they're just rolled over; a constant blood-letting which never allows the patient to recover. Inevitably, the lack of internal surplus forces a triage of services, and an increase in competition. It's a short step from that, to a loss of democracy and a rise of psychopath to the top (or the descent of someone at the top into psychopathy, in Mugabe's case, unchecked via said loss of democracy).
I have an 1899 book which sums it up: Round the World on a Wheel (John Foster Fraser). Three fellows who circled the planet by bicycle; no mean feat back then. Great book, fascinating read, amazing effort. But - they visited the King of Belgium before they departed; he wished them well, gave them letters of introduction. The King was concurrently lopping of the hands of Congo people who didn't produce rubber fast enough, by way of incentivising production. The rubber was for the recent western bicycle craze.....
Just to join in on the CC debate. I've felt that CC is a new religion for the politicians, instead of priests, to control the masses. There is now confirmation it is a religion.
https://www.helsinki.fi/en/news/science-policy/thirty-new-honorary-doct…
Faculty of Theology to confer eight honorary doctorates on 9 June 2023
Greta Thunberg, activist, now a Honorary Dr of Theology.
I wonder if she'll become a saint.
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