Here are the key things you need to know before you leave work today (or if you already work from home, before you shutdown your laptop).
MORTGAGE/LOAN RATE CHANGES
No changes to report again today.
TERM DEPOSIT/SAVINGS RATE CHANGES
Kiwibank has ended its 6.10% one year 'special' dropping back to 5.90% today. And you should note that we are now covering the new AMP term deposit offers in our rate tables. (These are based on Heartland Bank offers, but currently with a premium. So a one year rate is 6.35%.)
FOR-SALE LISTINGS ELEVATED, PRICES DROP
REINZ data shows house prices dropped for the second month in a row in May, as vendors bite the bullet and meet the lower market heading into winter.
IT'S BOTTOM-OF-THE-BARREL UGLY
The long-running BNZ-BusinessNZ services sector survey has recorded its worst ever non-Covid-affected level of activity. 'This tells of a services sector in reverse at pace' they say. They also note that with service sector activity plummeting, it is a threat to Q2-2024 GDP. This PSI is now lower than the lowest point in the 2008/GFC. The big dive in the employment index will worry policymakers.
ARGOSY UPDATED
For readers who use our NZX50 profiles and trackers, please note that the profile for Argosy Property (ARG, #30) has been updated with their latest annual results. The full set is always up-to-date. Sector analysis is here.
WHERE THE MONEY GOES
Our final major drilldown analysis of Budget 2024, this for the Transport spending by central government, has been uploaded.
ERRIE SILENCE ENDS
Laybuy is in receivership.
JAPANESE MACHINERY ORDERS DIP
Previously fast-rising Japanese machinery orders fell in April in March, but were up slightly year-on-year.
CHINA RETAIL SALES RISE MODESTLY
Chinese retail sales eased higher in May, up 3.7% when a +3.0% rise was expected. April rose +2.3% year-on-year, so this May result is an improvement. But you have to say, in the context of recent Chinese history, this is a modest gain. And remember, Chinese official CPI is rising less than +1% year-on-year.
CHINA COMMERCIAL DATA STRUGGLES
Meanwhile, Chinese industrial production fell in May from April to be +5.6% higher than a year ago. Markets were expecting that change to be +6%. April had expanded +6.7% on that basis. Tellingly however, electricity production rose just +2.3% in May from a year ago, up only +0.7% from April, staying at the lowish levels it has for the past year. And there was no meaningful recovery in their real estate sector either. The Chinese central bank kept its one-year Medium-Term Lending Facility rate unchanged in June at 2.5%.
LAND TAX HIKE?
In Australia, stories are swirling that NSW is about to raise its land tax rate. (Land tax is separate from property taxes, and does not apply to the family home, or farm. But it does apply to most other land.) NSW isn't the first to do this.
SWAP RATES ON HOLD
Wholesale swap rates are likely to be little-changed today. Our chart below will record the final positions. The 90 day bank bill rate is unchanged at 5.61%, a level it has hovered around for 110 days now. The Australian 10 year bond yield is up +2 bps from this morning at 4.16%. The China 10 year bond rate is down -3 bpsa on their lackluster data, now at 2.27%. The NZ Government 10 year bond rate is down -2 bps at 4.64% from yesterday and the earlier RBNZ fix was at 4.59% and down -3 bps from Friday. The UST 10yr yield is unchanged from yesterday at 4.26%. Their 2yr is now at 4.72%, so the curve is little-changed at -46 bps inverted.
EQUITIES VERY MIXED
The NZX50 is first out of the blocks for equity trading on Monday but it is off to a terrible start, down -1.2%. The ASX200 is only down -0.2% in afternoon trade. Tokyo has opened down -1.8%. Hong Kong is up +0.4% at ist open, Shanghai is down -0.6% however. Singapore is closed for Eid al-Hada. The S&P500 futures suggest Wall Street will open tomorrow a strong +1.2%.
OIL LITTLE-CHANGED
The oil price is little-changed from this time yesterday, now just under US$78/bbl in the US, and still just over US$82/bbl for the international Brent price.
GOLD A TAD LOWER
In early Asian trade, gold is slightly softer, down -US$13 from this morning at just on US$2321/oz.
NZD ON HOLD
The Kiwi dollar is marginally softer from this morning, now at 61.3 USc. Against the Aussie we are unchanged at 92.8 AUc. Against the euro we are still at 57.3 euro cents. This all means the TWI-5 is unchanged at just over 71.
BITCOIN ON HOLD
The bitcoin price is down -0.3% today from this morning, now at US$66,301. Volatility of the past 24 hours has been low at just under +/- 0.7%.
Daily exchange rates
Select chart tabs
Daily swap rates
Select chart tabs
This soil moisture chart is animated here.
Keep abreast of upcoming events by following our Economic Calendar here ».
77 Comments
It’ll be 3-4 months (edit) before the 1.8% September quarter drops off our data scope for inflation targeting. Will the RB wait for that to happen? God I hope not
Our stats and data is so sporadic and outdated by the time it’s released! It’s killing us.
Every man and their dog could see the q2 service sector is dead and q3 will be worse
Seems to be like it here in chez dumbthoughts.
Most prices are stable (some even coming down now) in terms of what we buy regularly, except for:
- Rates - got to cough up the money to build the Crusaders new losing ground
- Insurance - really starting to shop around on this. Also pulled back the wife's car and my old beater 4x4 to third party only (as on both the insurance premium for comprehensive was approaching probably 35-40% of the realistic private sale value).
- On a side note, does anybody have good insight/advice for how to realistically assess what you need insurance wise? We are fairly heavily insured across the likes of health, life, income loss from illness/injury and I've got various business policies. I think my broker does a good job typically but really feel we are perhaps "over insured" and want to determine what is really necessary.
- Daycare - prices up again, but with only one child and only three days a week it's not too bad
"realistically assess what you need insurance wise" - in theory if you can cover the loss without too much problem, you shouldn't get insurance.
- By that theory we wouldn't have pet insurance and we would have had to pay out a fortune.
- However we probably also wouldn't have full car insurance and would have saved a bit (recently at least)
- In most cases you should increase your excess assuming you can afford to pay it - although it often doesn't save you as much as you think
- In terms of house, I tend to think if the house burnt down we would just sell the land, so we probably should only cover the difference in value between the two (instead of the rebuild cost). However in ChCh you may find the land becomes valueless at the same time if an earthquake. Not sure what happens then.
- You lose quite a lot of money with insurance. 15% just in GST! Then they need to make a profit, their re-insurance needs to make a profit, their loss adjusters, etc. Plus all the fraudulent claims, the write offs when a bit of bog would do, etc. You must lose 50% or more on average.
I cancelled my last life insurance several years ago when I retired from full time work (adult children beneficiaries, it had a fixed premium & term at a good rate). My assets outweighed my insurance several times over by then.
Previously some decades ago I had my wife as an insurance beneficiary for my mortgage value.
Those are the only circumstances that I considered requiring life cover.
Interesting read the criteria for the NSW land tax. City Councils in NZ have though distorted rates by means of a quasi wealth tax that it is now highly inequitable. It is a charge for goods and services but regardless of the goods and services actually delivered per property, the charge is calculated predominantly on the overall value of the property. On top of that central government skims off 15% GST, easy pickings. In order to introduce a fair land tax in NZ all that would need to be first unwound and reconstituted on a more equitable base.
Ah, the old 'I don't use it so I shouldn't pay' chestnut.
Ends up arguing for 'user pays'. Which ultimately isn't a society, and delivers no amenities.
I remember sitting on a LC in the 80s, watching us trying to apply neoliberal ideology to every item, and finally got a chance to get my point across:
We got to cemeteries; I suggested they be user-pays...
Imagine user pays on roads! Our road alone probably sits on $20 million of land, add in the costs of building / maintaining / storm water / pollution / etc, divide it by aprox 100 residents who use it, it would cost many thousands a year each just to drive to the end of our road. And people complain about their rates bill...
Not so much that, the mechanism & basis was introduced, and then crept upwards& upwards, too long ago to remember and that formula has been enshrined. It is what it is and therefore it shouldn’t masquerade as a goods and service charge when the large percentage of it is a straightforward wealth tax. Call it what it is and central government call it the tax on a tax that it is.
The infrastructure commision recently questioned if we needed to spend 1 trillion over the next 30 years. Most of the projected cost acceleration would come from water and roads. Other sectors (e.g.energy) wouldn't really increase. The reason why water and roads increase so much? Maybe because they are not really subject to user pays and are bulk funded from taxes/rates.
If you want your rates to come down, vote for parties that will stop investing in more roads and that will instead invest in sustainable (economically) transport like public transport and walking and cycling and scooting.
Compared to Australia, our council rates are extortionate. On the Gold Coast (which has a similar population to Christchurch) rates are much cheaper, despite delivering the exact same services as New Zealand councils. If I sold my property in Christchurch and bought a similarly priced one on the Gold Coast, I would save ~$6,000 a year in rates alone. Thats before the upcoming 15% hike in Christchurch rates (whereas the GC rates are only going up 4% next year).
Who needs higher wages when there is thousands of dollars in savings just in rates? NZ has become not only expensive to buy, but even more expensive to live in compared to property markets like Australia.
Plenty of revenue is collected from road user charges and associated taxes on fuel. Probably most private car owners would be happy to pay a toll for convenience, such as was in place for the Lyttelton road tunnel for quite some time, if they could be confident that the funds wouldn’t be squandered elsewhere on vainglorious vanity projects. My reason for my suspicion is because I made a submission to the powers that be when the new Christchurch stadium was being stuffed around with that folk, including myself, might be happy to contribute to a special levy, provided that it was guaranteed that the money gathered would be safeguarded for that purpose. Answer - flat refusal to guarantee anything.
There’s your answer. Why pay for speed humps when a myriad of the much vaunted potholes will do the same job. Well then, has that not then been all along, a cunning scheme, conspired by the brown cardigan brigade, in secret in rooms without windows at the end of long dark corridors. Bravo! Just kidding!q
Do you know how what proportion of CCC have separated cycle-lanes? Look it up it might surprise you.
Also look up how many kilometres of roads have speed humps on them. You may also be surprised.
I'm guessing you won't because then you would have to actually face the reality of cold hard data showing you're reckons are shall we say dog-shite?
Agnostium, perhaps you could enlighten me with a reference or 2 on:
The proportion of rates spent on roads for cars only, ie no buses or cycles travel on them.
Which political parties are anti-car
Until then, I guess I’ll just consider your comments as “you reckons” with a clearly partisan political flavour.
Interestingly, while Oz property owners aren't charged GST on rates, landlords may be subsequently liable & therefore on charge tenants
https://community.ato.gov.au/s/question/a0J9s0000001DVb/p00028234
https://modoproperty.com.au/2022/10/faq-why-have-i-been-charged-gst-on-….
Government bond spreads concur without doubt.
Shamubeel Equab reaches a new conclusion
"We are just at the beginning of the recession in many ways."
https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/money/2024/06/absolute-plunge-in-profits…
In Australia, stories are swirling that NSW is about to raise its land tax rate. (Land tax is separate from property taxes, and does not apply to the family home, or farm. But it does apply to most other land.) NSW isn't the first to do this.
by Audaxes | 3rd Feb 22, 10:09am
And separately, China is pushing ahead with a "5 year trial" of a new property tax on homeowners. Their goal is to "guide rational property buying".
That’s just what is needed in order to deter land becoming a speculative vehicle. I and others have urged a policy of land taxation in order to collect the land’s rising site value, so that it will not be pledged to banks for mortgage credit to further inflate china’s housing prices. - Link
In Australia, stories are swirling that NSW is about to raise its land tax rate. (Land tax is separate from property taxes, and does not apply to the family home, or farm. But it does apply to most other land.) NSW isn't the first to do this.
Aussie is a disaster waiting to happen. And because it's been the 'lucky country', the levels of complacency and ineptitude are off the charts.
Things getting interesting in the big world. Let's have a look at US Pension funds:
-- Cannot get out of US Treasuries because under water
-- Cannot get out of mortgage-backed securities (housing and commercial) because under water
-- Cannot get out of Private Equity (see WSJ below)
-- Funds already borrowed debt to meet pension payments
-- Invested heavily in obscure Hedge Funds
-- Main investor in the unregulated, multi-billion “Buy Now Pay Later” loans
Private-equity and pension funds seemed like a match made in heaven. U.S. companies and states handed over control of some worker retirement savings. In exchange, they got a promise of high returns after a decade—and often received healthy cash payouts in the years before that.
Now the honeymoon is over. The payouts have dried up, creating an expensive problem for investment managers overseeing the savings of workers retired from big corporations and state and city governments.
https://www.wsj.com/finance/investing/pensions-piled-into-private-equit…
Had to happen.
I've been pointing out here, ever since the GFC, that the future cannot underwrite the claims made upon it.
Those pidgies are coming home to roost.
This time there is nobody big enough to do the bailing-out; even last time it required a degree of faith.
Pensions are the biggest con ever. What we will need in the future are efficient, high-quality health and care services, accessible housing, great public transport networks etc. But, instead of investing in those things as a society, we push private savers to build up a portfolio of shares and equity in the belief that people will be able to draw a pension from this stack of paper in the future. When (if) pensioners get their money, they will go looking to buy health and care services and find that the same financiers that extracted rent from their pension funds, have reappeared as private equity owners of oligopoly health and care services, which will then extract rent again from their pensions. It's a rort.
Property DGM from the US. You couldn't make this sh*t up.
Tides Equities is set to lose operational control of one of its largest Texas assets — a sprawling apartment complex that marked the syndicators’ expansion into the Austin market.
So a loan default on 636 apartments in Austin - $103 million loan ($162K per unit). The lender pushing for court to appoint receiver and lender claims sponsor is unwilling or unable to pay property manager and other operating expenses.
https://therealdeal.com/national/2024/06/14/tides-equities-defaults-on-…
Crunch! It was always going to come down to pensions. The future liabilities of the PFs are in the trillions of dollars, especially in North America & Europe. Aussie too. According to pdk there will be nothing left there to keep them going after 2030. I think we'll run out of political promises before we run out of resources, but I'm wrong john for a reason.
Seems to be a race to see which existential or economical crisis destroys the west and/or humanity.
Ever increasing list of likely causes (massive debt default, third world war, AI, climate change, pandemic, society breakdown) really kicks things off.
I recommend planning for a huge bowl of popcorn in your bunker.
Going to buy some earplugs on the way home - the sound of the economy going snap is getting deafening.
Look how good we had it when the National Govt was deficit spending from 2009 to 2016 and the price of imports just kept going down - meaning we only had a narrow current account deficit. Look at the slowdown when Labour ran a budget surplus for a few years (the idiots), before turning on the COVID funding taps and giving us a temporary bump.
At some point we have to stop with the blue vs red nonsense and work out how we can have a successful economy without relying on ever increasing private and / or govt deficits.
Agreed. I think we have to face up to the fact that we only had decent growth and increased productivity pre-GFC becuase we were fueled by spiralling private debt, and we only had a decent post-GFC period because imports just kept getting cheaper and cheaper in real terms (and we managed to fire up the housing ponzi a few times). Now what?!?
Yes this just popped up in my Twitter/X feed and had similar thoughts. I think we are about to have the recession we were meant to have in 2020 but it was masked by Covid and extreme fiscal/monetary intervention.
We need the same intervention now to save the economy and if not, this is shaping up like it could be far worse than the GFC (from a Nz specific perspective). Is this National government up to bailing out every household and business like in 2020? - if not, be prepared for a rough next 12-24 months.
Nah this sucker is going down, the rescue ship is only going to find floating debris... NACT doesn't even see the emergency, and even if it did doesn't have the ability to make a difference, its better to let it burn then rebuild.
The sad thing is that the big monopolies will probably survive.
The capacity (hopefully) is still there ... just not the demand. If the RBNZ takes their head out of their ass about now - we'll bounce back.
The longer they leave it though ...
I think I've mentioned November 2023 was about the right time to start easing? Yeah, well. Nobody ever listens to me. (lol)
Yes, a clearly signalled very slow easing starting in Nov 23 would have made a difference. I still think however that our economy is simply geared wrong now - what funding flows into the economy just gets sucked straight back out again by rentiers who stash it away, or used to buy imports thus increasing offshore savings in NZD. We just have too much dead money - we need to get it moving again.
NSW hasnt raised standard land tax, but has removed indexation for inflation. So the threshold for land tax is now frozen at $1.075m.
https://www.afr.com/property/residential/shock-property-tax-rise-hits-l…
Foreign Buyer taxes have increased
"Mr Mookhey also announced the foreign purchaser duty surcharge will increase from 8 per cent to 9 per cent from 2025.
The foreign owner land tax surcharge will also increase, from 4 per cent to 5 per cent."
"Mr Mookhey also announced the foreign purchaser duty surcharge will increase from 8 per cent to 9 per cent from 2025.
Mookhey is the clown who is framing Trump as a threat for NSW.
Trump is the ‘biggest threat’ to NSW economy and jobs, treasurer warns
https://www.smh.com.au/politics/nsw/trump-is-the-biggest-threat-to-our-…
To be fair, Trump is the biggest threat to all of us if he gets in again. Even if he doesn't, he could trigger further erosion of the long-standing conventions in US elections and create even more discord. So I think the dude is probably right in terms of a specific person.
The economic news was not so good today with plummeting business confidence and profits but don't worry help will be on it's way. Comrad Putin and his mate Trump will make sure new live will be blown into New Zealand's economy by a mass immigration of 2M+ USD safety seekers. They only need to convince Winston of this cunning plan!
We welcome your comments below. If you are not already registered, please register to comment.
Remember we welcome robust, respectful and insightful debate. We don't welcome abusive or defamatory comments and will de-register those repeatedly making such comments. Our current comment policy is here.