Here are the key things you need to know before you leave work today (or if you work from home, before you shutdown your laptop).
MORTGAGE RATE CHANGES
BNZ has trimmed its home loan rates again. More details here. All rates are here.
TERM DEPOSIT/SAVINGS RATE CHANGES
Heartland Bank reduced its TD rates today and they are now another to no longer offer any 5% rates. AMP mirrored those changes. All updated term deposit rates less than 1 year are here, for 1-5 years, they are here.
EXPORTS RISING FASTER THAN IMPORTS
Our exports are rising and our imports are rising slower. This allowed our December merchandise trade balance to record a +$219 mln surplus in the month, and a -$7.7 bln deficit for the calendar 2024 year. Both are much better than year-ago levels which in turn were better than 2022 levels.
TRADE SHIFTS IN 2024 SIGNIFICANT
In 2024 we ran a merchandise trade surplus of +$986 mln with China (down from $1.375 bln in 2023), a +$925 mln surplus with the USA (up from +$334 mln in 2023), a +$179 mln surplus with Australia (up from a small deficit in 2023), a -593 mln deficit with Japan (down sharply from a 2023 -$1.8 bln deficit), and a monster -$4.7 bln deficit with South Korea (up from a -$3.8 bln deficit in 2023). Our export data shows were have in fact diversified away from the China trade, with it down to 25% now. In 2021 it was 32%.
"WARILY OPTIMISTIC"
ANZ said its survey showed business confidence fell 8 points to +54 in January, while expected own activity eased 4 points to +46, still both very high. but "warily" so they noted. Past own activity (the best GDP indicator) was stable close to zero, while past employment continued to lift, though at -7 it remains in contraction. The same survey shows 'lingering inflation challenges under the surface'.
SMOKE
A Singapore Times investigative report has uncovered a recording where a person detailed for selling illegal and unregulated vaping products talks about bribing New Zealand officials to get access to the New Zealand market. He alludes to using the same techniques that big tobacco uses to retain market access. The company involved has links to the local one (both of who have links back to China) who won an non-competitive bid to supply our Health Department with vapes as part of their rejigged anti-smoking program, an initiative of NZ First's Casey Costello as Associate Minister of Health. (No evidence of formal links between Costello and members of the tobacco or vape industry have emerged. Costello had repeatedly denied any contact with industry players.)
VERY POPULAR, AGAIN
Investors rushed today's NZ Government bond tender issues, offering $1.72 bln in 144 bids for the $500 mln available. All tenors were in hot demand and this is the second consecutive week of unusually high demand. The bonds on order were the same as last week and yields to maturity slipped this week by about -90 bps across the offers. Details here.
FRAUD FOCUS
The Serious Fraud Office has set out its new Strategic Areas of Focus. They are now stated as:
- Corporate or commercial fraud that risks harm to New Zealand’s significant trade related industries,
- Fraud enabled by emerging technology, addressing risks like AI, cryptocurrency, and deepfakes
- Fraud that leverages an affinity to a particular community, emphasising trust exploitation
- Corruption of public officials that carries risk for health and safety, highlighting risks from subpar procurement practices
- Misappropriation of targeted government funding, including emergency recovery or rebuild (no change)
- Frauds perpetrated or facilitated by trusted professionals or professional enablers (no change)
- Foreign bribery or foreign interference allegations (no change).
NOT QUITE WHAT EVERYONE ASSUMES
In Australia, the RBA has released research into bank fees. Essentially they find banks are charging fewer in fees than ever before, and most of that fee income comes from charges to large businesses, not households.
SWAP RATES STABLE
Wholesale swap rates could be a little softer again today on global forces so keep an eye on our chart below which will record the final positions closer to 5pm. The 90 day bank bill rate was down -1 bps on Tuesday at 3.95%. The Australian 10 year bond yield is up +2 bps at 4.44%. The China 10 year bond rate has held at 1.64%. The NZ Government 10 year bond rate is up +1 bp at 4.63% while today's RBNZ fix was 4.56% and unchanged. The UST 10yr yield is now just on 4.54% and up +1 bp from where we were this time yesterday. Their 2yr is up +2 bps to just on 4.22%, so that positive curve is now at +31 bps.
EQUITIES MIXED BUT UNSETTLED WHERE TRADING
The NZX50 is down -0.8% from this time yesterday. The ASX200 is up +0.6% from yesterday as rate cut hopes build. Tokyo is up +0.1% in early Thursday trade. Hong Kong, Shanghai and Singapore are all closed for CNY holidays. Wall Street ended its Wednesday session after the US Fed decisions (and Trump reaction) down -0.5% on the S&P500 and clearly reacting to the Fed more than Trump's blister.
OIL LOWER
The oil price is -US$1 lower from this time yesterday now just under US$73/bbl in the US, and just over US$76.50/bbl for the international Brent price.
CARBON PRICE IN RANGE
The carbon price is still within its tight range, but firmed again today to NZ$63.50/NZU. The next release of units at the official auction is on March 19, 2025. See our new daily chart tracker of the NZU price for carbon, courtesy of emsTradepoint.
GOLD EASES
In early Asian trade, gold is down -US$6 from yesterday, now at US$2758/oz.
NZD ON HOLD
The Kiwi dollar has held unchanged from this time yesterday, still at 56.6 USc. Against the Aussie we are down -10 bps at 90.7 AUc. But against the euro we are up +10 bps at 54.3 euro cents. This all means the TWI-5 is now just under 67.2 and little-changed from yesterday.
BITCOIN FIRM
The bitcoin price has risen today, now at US$104,272 and up +2.5% from this time yesterday. Volatility of the past 24 hours has been modest at just over +/- 1.6%.
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89 Comments
Inflation and people's behaviour. I recall way back in the day, a pie maker had the biggest drop in demand when we who were farming were lucky to get $3 for an old ewe.
Himself when we were dropping off at the wool and skin man and saw the pie shopped shuttered, said 'this lot makes the flies, the other guy once made the pies'.
What happened today? The fed holds rates! Looks like the US has found its neutral rate at 4.5%. Our OCR is 4.25%, and apparently, our neutral rate is around 3%. Our economy must be hungover from our recent debt binge, with NZ reaching maximum debt saturation back in 2021.
Doesn't look like US exceptionalism is ending anytime soon, so they can keep crushing our currency. Next stop NZ dollar below 50 cents.
US strong economy, strong rates, strong dollar.
NZ weak economy, weak rates, weak dollar.
It’s going to be very entertaining watching Trump and Powell at odds over rates this year.
"Fed Is Not in Hurry to Lower Rates, Powell Says": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFq3FPyxjTk
Hyundai is doing well in NZ after coming from nowhere a few years ago. I took a Hyundai over a Toyota, the Japanese stuff was great but now its no better than anything else. More bang for you buck from Hyundai and its starting to show with the number of their cars on the roads.
Electricity is still energy that is generated from somewhere. When you need baseload, you cannot rely on renewables as the storage technology isn't there yet bar dams which no govt seems capable of investing in for the long term given a high initial cost (sigh). if the wind drops, and the lakes are low, then the base load needs to come from somewhere and you can bet it is from fossil fuelled stations - for a reason.
"In Australia, the RBA has released research into bank fees. Essentially they find banks are charging fewer in fees than ever before, and most of that fee income comes from charges to large businesses, not households."
Say what? Seriously?
My view is that most 'fees' for household banking is pure A.I. stuff (and much of it is!) and therefore cheap as chips to banks! To conflate household fees with the complex stuff that banks have to deal with with large businesses is pure b.s.
(Have already written to the RBA with this view before. The RBA is giving Ozzie banks a 'free pass'. Shame on them! will our RBNZ be any different? I have no expectation they will. So much for 'competition', ay? And in case you are confused - Regulators are, in a very real sense, competition!)
Sheesh.
Energy underwrites money, 100%.
Really, the keystroked proxy should be valued in Joules. All a price drop tells you - given that we have burned our way through the best half already - is that there is a perception of less demand ahead, or there is less demand now. All the Trump/Saudi/cheap rhetoric is, is cover for the need to commandeer the last half. If it doesn't get 'expensive' - and 2008 taught us there is an upper limit beyond which the system tanks - increasing amounts of the last half cannot be 'economically' extracted. And oscillatory recessions on the way down, will reduce the 'price' relative to a few yesterdays.
But the underlying problem cannot be solved; the energy we now obtain, global average, cannot support growth. Thus more debt is accrued than GDP - and GDP was already famously omissive. But cheer the drying carpets on B Deck by all means.
https://unionrayo.com/en/water-engine-innovation-racing/
I like this development. And I don't disagree with any of what you write. Thumbs up.
Somewhere back - maybe 1972 - I was in a Singer Gazelle - minus bonnet and air-clearer - heading to Invercargill. We were tapped-out at about 85 MPH, just south of Mataura. Ran into a dense fog. Got closer to 90 MPH.
It was water-injection (as a car full of NZCE students, self included, quickly worked out) from the fog. Hardly a new idea...
But when you think it through, the energy doesn't come from the water, and energy cannot be created. So has to be from the heat of the burn - which turns water to steam which is an expansion. The burn is still hydrogen, correct? I think they are looking at operating at higher burn temperatures and trying to cool that, but they still have the 'need to create the hydrogen first' problem. That process is energy-negative; there has to be electricity splitting water to make it.
I'm surprised they aren't running into pre-ignition (knocking - what tetraethyl lead was used for, for years).
Complexity is often the result of pursuing absolute efficiencies;
go well
Had a Minx Series Six. Firestone Wide Ovals. Only on a downhill sweep could get the coveted 100mph. Thought about twin chokes but wrote it off in 1971, midst of the Lions tour. Lucky didn’t take me with it. Big scar to look at whilst shaving means never will be forgotten.
Chuckle. I had a Glas Royal Gogomobile, with a H80 motor and box, remote shift (they worked backwards) held between two bits of angle-iron (the Gogo had no chassis). Datsun 1200 rear end, fibreglass and galvo front extension. All the motor wieght was ahead of the front axle-line, so spins were easy.
Drat compliance...
My mother, always different, sported a Isetta which she once drove mid winter CHC - NEL return round about 65. In the post war days the family farm car had been a Bentley 4.5 sedan. Mother diligently drove everything else, including the Isetta it was after all a BMW, in the same manner. Funniest sight you could imagine when the Isetta failed one morning she enlisted a tow from the neighbour in his Fiat 500. It was so much like the circus where the clowns drove the little Noddy cars. Video would be worthy of Benny Hill.
The Singer speed phenomenon probably just the result of colder, denser charge and therefore a bigger bang. The existence of fog suggests locally colder air leading to saturation at same air moisture content. Simple psychrometrics. Ooops, forgot for a moment this is a financial website…
The problem, as always, is the rate at which we consume energy. Human civilization requires much more energy and in different forms than the sun can provide given the infrastructure we have.
Wind, solar and other renewables by themselves can power a civilization that is good to live in. Just not this one.
Doesn't work tho does it Jim, we are still using loads of fossil fuels to make solar panels. Until solar is all there is and we are using only solar energy to make more panels is it sustainable long term. You don't have to be a genius to work out its not possible on the scale required to meet current needs.
Great discussion-thread.
Yesterday, there was an uneducated comment that 'the sun is essentially unlimited'. That missed the crucial point, which is that solar energy is of quite high entropy (low density). It lands at 1kw per perpendicular square metre, and the best we do is about 30% collection, while the sun shines.
Fossilised sunlight was compressed by aeons of tectonic movement, at no cost to us. It is of much lower entropy (higher density). Nothing matches high-EROEI oil, but we have built an infrastructure collection based on it being available forever.
We will end up living on real-time solar, and the sooner we get out heads around that, the better. But it won't be at this level...
I ponder that a lot.
Depends on war(s) and climate and maybe even nature (pandemics). The faster we drop back, the bigger the sustainable population (more remaining resources per person). People smarter than me, reckon 2 billion a good-peasant level (think: Mekong Delta living) and south of 1 billion at ours (which is a Catch-22 because south of 1 billion, we probably can't specialise enough).
My specialty is repurposing; triaging stuff which already exists, into something of future use. My paid writing is in that arena, my lifestyle based on it. My micro-hydro, for instance, is an old washing-machine motor, mounted in an old back-pack vacuum-cleaner housing. There will be perhaps 100 years, whre the decaying-but-existing pile of 'stuff' will be gold to MacGuyver types, and I suspect there will be 2-3 generations where that will be a respected skill.
"That missed the crucial point, which is that solar energy is of quite high entropy (low density). It lands at 1kw per perpendicular square metre, and the best we do is about 30% collection, while the sun shines. "
An excellent example of why your maths is so screwed up, PDK. So childlike. Keep up the good work.
For those unaware, PDK's 'statistic' relates to PV cells, i.e. solar panels. It completely ignores the energy taken up by plants, heat, as water vapor, etc. And it ignores the energy from our moon which is largely untapped as a pure energy source but is used all the time.
No, it does not.
Photosynthesis is no better than PV.
It is a great pity that Chris was given this - free - textbook to learn from. He ran a mile - but still 'knows'. Amazing...
Others will get a lot out of it
"We will end up living on real-time solar, and the sooner we get out heads around that, the better."
No, we won't - at least not for 000's of years, and even then, probably not.
As fossil fuel prices rise due to scarcity (or, as I hope, due to regulation!), other energy sources will rise to prominence. Just like now where it is cheaper to produce electricity from wind and solar than from any other source.
And only 'solar'? Really? What about lunar? I've never once heard you mention that potential. Why not? Oh. Right. Doesn't fit your doom-loop narrative, right?
Lunar? You mean dimly-reflected solar? Worse - more entropic - obviously, that the pre-reflected variety?
Nuts.
Just nuts.
Go read and learn, please - you're wasting everyone's time, including your own.
Edit - just realised you might mean tidal, talking of lunar. Again, too highly-entropic. A person I knew well for a while, did his thesis into tidal. And found a job somewhere else. As they all do. Apart from a couple of special geographical bores, it's a no-goer. Same with wave - too high on the entropy scale.
"We will end up living on real-time solar, "
Real-time solar? Please explain how mega-batteries, e.g. Lake Onslow, molten salts, green hydrogen, etc. or plant based storage, e.g. oils, wood, alcohol etc., are 'real-time'. I can wait ...
[I expect ad hominens as a response. that's what you get when you challenge religious beliefs.]
Yes, we will store real-time solar, in a capacitor-like manner.
But compared to the rate at which we are depleting the stored fossilised sunlight, it's a drop in the bucket. And what, pray tell, is collecting the energy you use to pump the up-water in the Onslow configuration? Wind? Built by? Nobody, but nobody, has ever built a windmill using the power of a windmill. Or wiil - the EROEI is so low that there isn't an industrial society.
Here's that book you avoid like the plague - P26 (Picky Details) 'Yes, I'm being imprecise. This is really a book about entropy - aa trickier thing to explain. When we 'use up' one kilojoule of energy, what we are really doing is taking one kilojoule of energy in a form than has low entropy ... and converting it into an exactly equal amount of energy in another form, usually on which has a much higher entropy (for example, hot air otr hot water)'
I do wish you'd take(n) the opportunity to learn. Batteries are stores of energy; not makers of it. Solar was the original source for all the stocks we are depleting; coal, gas, oil, firewood. And we'll be down to real-time solar, once we've razed the stocks.
Hmm. There is actually interesting analysis going on out there on the questions of whether we have the energy and stuff (raw materials) to shift our energy sources. It doesn't look as bad as one might thing: https://www.penguin.co.nz/books/not-the-end-of-the-world-9781529931242
If it doesn't get 'expensive' - and 2008 taught us there is an upper limit beyond which the system tanks - increasing amounts of the last half cannot be 'economically' extracted. And oscillatory recessions on the way down, will reduce the 'price' relative to a few yesterdays.
This has been called the 'choke-chain effect': https://globaldialogue.isa-sociology.org/articles/the-choke-chain-effec…
The Bombardier that crashed was a CRJ700. I think they carry up to 60 to 70 passengers. I've been reading the US has been having problems getting qualified Air Control positions. And Trump brilliant plan offering retirement for Federal employees just focuses on his utter ignorance.
As investors focusing on commodities rather than over valued tech was proved to us over the last few days.Nvidia's fall was more than the entire Irish GDP [545 billion]. Incredible.
Regardless of the snide I have received here tonight we in New Zealand may be glad we have a commodity economy!
In the words of Person C
Person C: “Oh, no, no, no, we don’t do that visibly in Australia and New Zealand. But government payments are not a problem for us because, because these are extremely... how do I put it... subtle. It’s just like how the Big Tobacco does it, right, they go through multiple shell companies and associations and consultants and agencies and whatnot. And it’s almost… you need to have a very persistent investigative journalist to find out...”
Government just released its international target for the second tranche of emissions.Sets a probability target of 51-55% of 2005 emissions.
https://environment.govt.nz/news/second-international-climate-target-un…
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