Here's our summary of key economic events overnight that affect New Zealand with news the last few days of the northern summer holiday period are quiet but basically positive.
First, American retail sales at physical stores were up +5.0% last week from the same week in 2023, another pointer that the consumer side of the American economy hasn't stumbled yet.
But there are of course pockets of regional variation. The Richmond Fed's factory survey wasn't so flash in its August survey with a tenth straight contraction. The service sector in the region was stable however.
But the Texas Dallas Fed service sector survey is contracting just as we reported yesterday its manufacturing sector was.
But these regional business sentiment pockets might be outliers. As we noted for the Redbook retail survey, consumers seem upbeat. And that is reinforced by the latest Conference Board survey of consumer sentiment. The rise in optimism on a national level contrasts with a few pockets of business pessimism.
A very well supported US Treasury 2yr bond auction brought a median yield of 3.83% overnight, down more than -50 bps from 4.39% at the prior equivalent event a month ago. It's a bond rally directly related to the Fed signals at Jackson Hole.
Across the Pacific, China said profits at its largest industrial firms (mostly SOEs) rose +3.6% in the first seven months of 2024. This was little-changed from June. They were up +4.1% in July from the same month a year ago. That they are still profitable overall is a good sign, and they are not getting worse.
As China returns from its summer holidays, one thing may be missing - childcare. The sharp demographic shifts are moving faster now and a nationwide causality is childcare centers. Businesses providing these services closed for summer and a rather large number of them aren't re-opening. Enrollments are diving reflecting the swift shift in attitudes from the 'last generation'. (Of course, China doesn't have this problem on its own, but it is particularly fierce there.)
Taiwan however has reported a continuing rise in consumer sentiment there. In fact, these levels are now back at levels last seen in March 2020 before the pandemic hit the island nation. From June this year, you may even call the rise a surge.
The UST 10yr yield is now at just under 3.84% and up +3 bps from yesterday. The key 2-10 yield curve inversion is now only -7 bps. Their 1-5 curve inversion is little-changed at -74 bps. And their 3 mth-10yr curve inversion is also little-changed at -150 bps. The Australian 10 year bond yield starts today at 3.98% and up +6 bps from yesterday. The China 10 year bond rate is up +2 bps at 2.18%. The NZ Government 10 year bond rate is now at 4.25% and up +5 bps from yesterday.
Wall Street is up +0.2% on the S&P500. Overnight European markets were mixed between +/- 0.3%. Yesterday Tokyo ended its Tuesday session up +0.5%. Hong Kong ended up +0.4%. Shanghai ended down -0.2%. Singapore was up just +0.1%. But the ASX200 was down -0.1%, and the NZX50 ended its Tuesday session down a sharp -1.1% with an ugly final hour of trading.
The price of gold will start today up +US$1 from yesterday at US$2519/oz, another record high.
Oil prices are down -US$1.50 at US$75.50/bbl in the US while the international Brent price is now just over US$78.50/bbl.
The Kiwi dollar starts today up nearly +40 bps from yesterday at 62.5 USc. Against the Aussie we are up about the same to 92 AUc. Against the euro we are up +30 bps to 55.9 euro cents. That all means our TWI-5 starts today at 70.1 and also up +40 bps.
The bitcoin price starts today at US$61,804 and down -3.2% from this time yesterday. Volatility over the past 24 hours has been modest at just on +/- 1.8%.
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75 Comments
Back on track. Coalition tells KO it has to stop building and people are wondering why KO construction has stopped. This is a straight up consequence of the government decision to cancel KO. Why is anyone surprised and why isn't the Herald reporting it as such. Here's a guess, they will flog it to one of the coalition's private developer mates.
https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/kainga-oras-arlington-development-site-in…
KO site near us seems to have stalled as well. Although 66% of it is private development, maybe they have understandably stalled.
KO have done some pretty amazing stuff recently, it’s a pity we elect National at a time we should be investing not slashing. Everything is out of sync.
On construction- yes I have been for a while, who hasn’t, building anything makes no sense with current costs and interest rates. But I have been continually surprised on the up side by the data, with building consents etc all doing better than I expected. But looks like that has finally changed.
Even anecdotally there were still projects starting up near us a few months back, but I haven’t seen one since.
You are 100% right, building costs cannot come down much but Land costs and interest rates can. By late 2025 interest costs will be manageable and the land hoarders will have to meet the market as the builders cannot be buyers are higher levels. Same dance happens every big cycle
Hey Jimbo, it is not a time where we should be investing. We were using money that we did not have under the labour government and only started to see the consequences early last year. I know that you know that inflation is caused by printing more money which dilutes the value of the currency. I have many friends that are property developers and they tell me its not worth doing new developments because there is just no more margin. Why? Because cost of resources and the cost of labour is up (remember minimum wage went from 16.50-22.70 within 6 years of Labour govt). If Labour had been elected again, for all I know inflation could've hit 10%+ and spending would not have stopped.
You need to identify cause, vs caused.
If you have a mole on your right cheek, and for 40 years didn't get cancer, you may well believe the presence of the mole has been the cause. The belief was incorrect, but worked for you until the day you walked out of oncology...
Blaming Labour (the mole) is wrong.
Blaming resources is closer to the truth.
Blaming the Limits to Growth, our proximity thereto, would get you all the way there.
If wages have gone up then so has spending power? The developer should put up their prices in line with wage inflation. I suspect your anecdote is conflating the wrong issues.
It's not the minimum wage increase that's making it not profitable to develop, it's the fact that people can no longer borrow at 2.5% mortgage rates, but the development has been costed on that basis. Your friends should blame the retail banks for baiting everybody into cheap debt, and then ratcheting it up 3 fold 12 month's later.
As a private developer just commented on Facebook, for $48M they could have built 36 homes (3 per section) including the cost of purchasing land. KO spent $48M and has delivered nothing on a site that they already owned. That's about as far from "amazing stuff" as you can possibly get. KO needs to be shut down completely, everyone who worked there sacked, and then rebuilt from the ground up with people who have a clue what they are doing.
Labour's plan was to force small local tax paying investors out of the rental market by removing interest deductibility, whilst providing even greater (and more costly) tax subsidies to foreign corporates for Build To Rent projects that would send all profits offshore and thus avoid paying tax altogether.
As a country we need to break apart the construction materials market so that develops can build homes that are cheaper. This approach would be far more beneficial.
That is really only going to have a nominal impact on the cost to build, if at all.
Really, the government need to decide if the aim is mass affordable homes, or "subsidised housing" as you say. My belief is it should be the former, and the government should upend their current approach, which is very expensive and time consuming.
Which they should be able to do, because they're the government, and they set the rules.
KO was so poorly run which was typical under the labor govt as was most things and now its your chance to buy the property in which they probably paid way too much for it and the coalitions mates wouldn't touch it with a barge pole as you wouldn't be able to make any money out of it that's called a sensible business decision something the Communist Labor party lacked.
They have built a lot of really good stuff near us, much better than anything the private market is doing. I’m sure it comes at a cost, but the long term cost of building crap KO slums like in the past has to work out more.
I’m not necessarily attributing it all to Labour, a lot of it was underway before they were elected, although I think Labour upped the spec.
Again if you look in our area there are a few designs that are repeated just flipped around or with different trim etc. It’s difficult as the land is all sloping and the streets are curved.
But yes there is some hideous wastage, not surprising with a government department and contractors clipping the ticket. Cutting KO budget will probably just reduce the quality, the wastage is a feature of any government work
Because gang members deserve to live in six star million dollar homes? That's part of the problem - this socialist idea that people who dont want to work deserve to live in better homes than those who do work and who struggle to afford their own house.
Public housing should be the absolute bare minimum. If they want a nicer house, they can get off their chuff and go work for it.
The public system can't afford to provide people with virtually no income with the same sort of housing afforded to people earning $100k (maybe more like $150k+).
The end result of your line of thinking is less of those brave souls taking one for team having housing at all. Which would we prefer, adequate housing for everyone, or superior housing for less?
"In fact our economic system requires some people not to work." Superficially yes, and this observation has been made by a number of commenters over the years. But the principle is that those not in work will rotate into work as it is available and others are waiting. the concept is of a pool of labour available to take up work when it is available. Not working is not supposed to be a career choice though.
For millenia people have had to work to provide food and housing for themselves and their children, directly and indirectly. People who didn't work to provide would not have been allowed to freeload of the rest of their society for very long. They would have been pushed out pretty brutally in the end if they persisted. Nature can be a harsh mistress. That principle should be brought back and the current system rework to enshrine it.
Actually, from the moment we became sedentary agriculturalist a segment of society has traditionally freeloaded of the work and efforts of others. Thet have taken many forms, kings, aristocracy, landholders, clergy, administrators, financiers, etc...
The difference now is that we have designed a system that actually forces people to be unemployed for the system to work. How can they be freeloaders when we need them to be unemployed.
It's a shit system but there it is.
Think this one is a private development?
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/526228/hundreds-of-new-homes-in-mas…
KOs remit wasn't just house-building, that is fairly easy, they had a whole bunch of other outcomes they had to achieve that private companies do not because their primary objective is profit.
I do not doubt that KO could do things better, generally speaking any organisation can always do better. What I'm saying is that you're not comparing like for like when you compare private and public sector.
If housing could be delivered by the private sector how come they haven't?
"KO was so poorly run" Seems to be a very common comment which I don't think is deserved. If you want to see poorly run then look no further than the private sector. Fletcher Building.
Or Du Val or any of the smaller developers that go bankrupt all the time. I get bored of saying it's pointless comparing the private sector to the public sector. The private sector has one objective: make profit. Profit is not the overwhelming priority for the public sector, the wellbeing of the population is.
Although I note the coalition government want to legislate to prevent local council's using wellbeing as their primary focus, I'm not sure what is more basic than the wellbeing of their constituents as a primary council objective. Maybe they will decide council's primary objective is to extract rates from the population and use those rates to pay back the coalition's funders. It certainly appears to be the strategy.
I get bored of saying it's pointless comparing the private sector to the public sector. The private sector has one objective: make profit.
Which it has to do, by delivering value. KO doesn't have delivering efficiency and value as a primary requirement, profit or no. Lumbering the country with slow and over priced delivery, is not in the publics wellbeing.
If you didn't have the private sector giving a point of reference, I guess you couldn't have a comparison to realise how bad KO is at driving results.
Again you're confusing two different things. Profit is the ultimate objective. When you say they have to deliver value to deliver profit there are many many many ways to determine value, but the one the private sector needs to deliver on is profit.
If they can flog a shitty development riddled with leaks to a gullible buyer at a profit and hide their profits through offshore trusts they have been successful.
The public sector does not have the benefit of a single objective like 'profit'. Their value proposition is whatever the govt of the day decides it is and they have to deliver on that. If the govt had told them to stack in as many units as possible, don't worry about the neighbours, don't worry about long-term maintenance, don't worry about fostering innovation in house building techniques, don't worry about adverse environmental impacts, just get the minimum viable product consented and built I sure KO would have done things differently but they weren't. So it is not an apples for apples comparison.
A very well supported US Treasury 2yr bond auction brought a median yield of 3.83% overnight, down more than -50 bps from 4.39% at the prior equivalent event a month ago. It's a bond rally directly related to the Fed signals at Jackson Hole.
Just as low interest rates are being validated in every way, some Economists like Nouriel Roubini are alleging that yields are instead being held down by noted monetary genius Janet Yellen who has the Treasury Department engaged in a form of stealth QE. The problem is actually Economists who think interest rates are nothing more than tools to be manipulated by all-powerful govts when in reality they are more accurate though not perfect reflections of how govts fail. Link
Bank dealers bidding at the auction seek safety and liquidity, in an uncertain world.
The Treasury has today announced that NZ$6 billion of the nominal 15 May 2036 New Zealand Government Bond has been issued via syndication.
The bonds, which carry a coupon of 4.25%, were issued at a spread of 9 basis points over the 15 May 2035 nominal bond, at a yield to maturity of 4.365%. Total book size, at final price guidance, exceeded NZ$22.7 billion.
Another aspect, speculating hedge funds.
As the article points out, their is now a USD 1.2 trillion notional short position in US treasury futures. You should not read this as the market being bearish on treasuries. It is a levered trade to make a “risk free” return on the difference in price between off the run treasuries and treasury future positions. For every short position in the treasury futures, there should be a long position in the physical market. Link
Moneyless, Fed jawboning via so called monetary policy actions doesn't feature in the daily deliberations of bank traders and their clients.
In relative terms, they are lucky.
'Of course, China doesn't have this problem on its own'
David, dispassionate journalism would suggest it is not a problem. Indeed, reduction is a blessing, and the sooner the better. Or would you rather we covered the planet shoulder-to-shoulder, smothered in debt-proxies?
Yes, depopulating has a 'how to care for the over-represented elderly during the process' question - but compared to overpopulation, it is virtually irrelevant. De-population is do-able, and the only pathway to long-term human continuance. Overpopulation is a sure way to collapse.
As China returns from its summer holidays, one thing may be missing - childcare. The sharp demographic shifts are moving faster now and a nationwide causality is childcare centers. Businesses providing these services closed for summer and a rather large number of them aren't re-opening. Enrollments are diving reflecting the swift shift in attitudes from the 'last generation'. (Of course, China doesn't have this problem on its own, but it is particularly fierce there.)
Don't worry, we're making the same mistakes at a lower rate. The world is testing the Easterlin hypothesis and so far...looks like it's holding true!
Is a falling population a problem, or an essential part of a changing world? Of course it will cause problems as a larger percentage of citizens live longer and put more pressure on the tax base, but the carrying capacity of earth is not infinite, so overall, I think falling birth rates is a good thing.
"...overall, I think falling birth rates is a good thing."
The issue is that the countries with significantly higher population growth rates are typically riven by historic endemic religious, racial and gender dogma and intolerance resulting in high social, education and economic disparities.
A proportion of the population then seeks to become economic refugees in their more enlightened neighbour countries while bringing their dysfunction with them.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_population_growth_…
Where are the youth of NZ headed with an unemployment rate that is quite possibly well beyond acceptable? If the general rate of unemployment has been tracking up .3% last few 1/4's (4%,4.3%,4.6%) Whats happening to our 15-24 year olds (12.4% in May) This is a terrible stat. What plan does the current Govt have to bring these numbers down other than 'traffic lighting' them? Some evidence the 15-19 year olds are sitting on 23%.. 20% increase in leaving NZ ...I dont blame them ...lol
https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/national/517772/increase-in-youth-not-in-job…
https://berl.co.nz/economic-insights/young-adults-bear-brunt-increasing…
Here's a laundry list of everything contributing to the problem:
- Our education system is broken and out of sync with the needs of the actual economy, resulting is an overqualified and undertrained workforce.
- The rapid de-industrialisation and boom-bust cycles of our economy makes training locals in manufacturing and construction trades a difficult prospect
- In the professional sector, our broken migration system allows older, experienced expats to outcompete local grads for the very few entry-level jobs on offer.
In fact NZ scores fairly well on inequality, approx =UK & other Euro countries, much better than Oz.
https://gfmag.com/data/economic-data/world-inequality-ranking/
Germanium and gallium shortage due to Chinese export restrictions are starting to bite, semiconductor producers are facing down shortages. America tried to crush Chinese semis but only boosted the industry. Now Western semis will be slowly choked. Idiots running the show. Link
Where are the Chinese babies? In New Zealand, Australia, Canada ....
The birth rate for Asian babies in NZ this year was up 12%, and for the first time exceeded the number of Maori babies born. Asian children are New Zealand's future.
Better question is to ask where all the European babies have gone. European births were down 14% this year in NZ, a loss of 5000 children - presumably now all little Australians instead.
Surely a lot of that has to do with how left-leaning Pakeha youth has become over the last couple of generations. Many first or second gen Asian migrants in the West by comparison still hold core conservative values such as getting married and raising a family and have a less entitled approach towards life not waiting around for the government to fix all their problems.
He is...this site never ceases to amaze me in the dumber and dumber comments that appear?
The birth rate for Asian babies in NZ this year was up 12%, and for the first time exceeded the number of Maori babies born. Asian children are New Zealand's future.
Did you not mean Asian and Maori babies are NZ's future?
Glad the PM cut back on staff levels , clearly some of the surplus created is already earmarked..."tight circumstances"...lol
https://www.1news.co.nz/2024/08/27/totally-mad-up-to-7m-to-be-spent-on-…
OTTAWA, Aug 26 (Reuters) - Canada, following the lead of the United States and European Union, said on Monday it would impose a 100% tariff on imports of Chinese electric vehicles and announced a 25% tariff on imported steel and aluminum from China.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/trudeau-says-cana…
Neoliberal consensus on the way out....to be replaced by what?
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