Here's our summary of key economic events over night that affect New Zealand, with news of new lockdown restrictions in New Zealand, with Level 3 imposed on the Auckland region.
Internationally, the big news is in the gold market with its own big move.
Before we get to that, last week's data for US retail sales showed a further gain, up +2.5% from the same week in July and down only -3.1% from the same week in 2019. This was an encouraging improvement.
Also encouraging were July housing start data from Canada which came in much better than expected and better than in June. But the overall numbers masked weakness in western provinces.
But there are warning signals as well. Small business closures in the US seem to be gathering pace and there is no official data on that. Commercial landlords face a crisis of their own as a consequence, especially in Manhattan. And a senior US Fed official is warning the American economy might yet get swallowed into a 'sinkhole'. And further, there is no Congressional progress on renewed fiscal stimulus or extended support.
Compounding the problems, US producer price rises are picking up, mirroring consumer prices, as tariff-based inflation beds in there. Economic contraction with higher prices is not a recipe anyone wants for the world's largest economy.
In China, July vehicle sales were up more than +16% compared to July 2019. For passenger cars alone, they rose +8% in July from a year earlier to 1.63 million units. And that came after a stumble in June when they slipped slightly.
And new lending in China is still growing at a fast pace, but just not quite as fast as in earlier months.
Wall Street has started today with a small gain. The S&P500 is up +0.5% so far today. Overnight however, European markets raced higher, mostly up more than +2%. Yesterday, Shanghai ended its session down a sharp -1.2% but Hong Kong was up +2.1% and Tokyo was up +1.9%. The ASX200 rose another +0.5%. The NZX50 slipped -0.3% and with the renewed lockdown status will probably fall again today.
The latest global compilation of COVID-19 data is here. The global tally is 20,152,000 and that is up +215,000 since this time yesterday. Global deaths reported now exceed 738,000 (+6,000).
A quarter of all reported cases globally are in the US, which is up +52,100 from this time yesterday to 5,270,700. US deaths are now just over 166,900 and a death rate of 504/mln (+3/mln). And the net number of people actively infected in the US rose overnight to 2,384,100, so still more new infections than recoveries.
In Australia, there have now been 21,713 COVID-19 cases reported, another 316 overnight, and still very much concentrated in Victoria. But there were another +22 in Sydney and NSW can't seem to shake its small community transfer outbreak. Australia's death count is up to 331 (+18). Their recovery rate is now just on 57%. There are now 8995 active cases in Australia (+45) indicating a rising recovery rate but still more infections than recoveries.
The UST 10yr yield is sharply higher and now at 0.66% and an unusual +8 bps rise. Most of this rise is at the long end of the rate curve. Their 2-10 curve is sharply firmer at +49 bps. And their 1-5 curve is up as well at +14 bps, while their 3m-10yr curve is even steeper at +57 bps. The Aussie Govt 10yr yield is up sharply too at 0.91%, a +5 bps overnight rise. The China Govt 10yr is holding at 2.99%. And the NZ Govt 10 yr yield is likewise little-changed at just on 0.78%.
The gold price has been dumped overnight, down -US$117 to now be at US$1,915/oz. This is a -5.8% retreat in one day and a huge movement for the yellow metal. Today's move has unwound most of the gains over the past two weeks. The silver price is in a sharp retreat too, down by more than -13%.
Oil prices are softer today by less than -US$1/bbl. They are now just under US$42/bbl in the US and the international price is now just under US$45/bbl.
And the Kiwi dollar fell overnight on the local COVID-19 lockdown news, and after some earlier gains in offshore markets is back at 65.9 USc which is where it was this time yesterday. Against the Australian dollar we are soft at 92 AUc. Against the euro we are down slightly at 56 euro cents. That means our TWI-5 is now still at just under 69.2, aided in the background with rises against the British pound and Japanese yen.
The bitcoin price is down -3.3% overnight at US$11,525. The bitcoin rate is charted in the exchange rate set below.
All eyes will be on the new lockdown consequences locally now. And later today, the RBNZ issues its latest Monetary Policy Report, but it might be somewhat overshadowed and outdated by the reimposed L2 and L3 lockdowns due at lunchtime.
The easiest place to stay up with event risk today is by following our Economic Calendar here ».
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128 Comments
No way the gold price moves over the last couple of weeks was sustainable, at some point there would have to be a shake out and consolidation.
Bets on where the new COVID case originated?
1. Border - false negative test, an escapee, a customs officer or airline crew
2. Isolation Hotel - cleaner/security getting infected or staff
3. Bogeyman - a vector we haven't figured out yet
It's in South Auckland. I am picking a cleaner at a hotel, who probably unwittingly infected a church group or similar. Was always a case of when, not if, now it's time to test the response...
Second wave is inevitable because coronavirus is very infectious and the question was when and not if.
Cannot blame anyone but dirty politics will start specially now, knowing who is leading national party.
Similarly asset class be it stock or house will be hit because of fundamental and is question of when and not if (Though more printing of money under the garb of stimulus may delay the inevitable)
1 - 3 pretty much on par for any political party. But your last one rankles a bit Kezz. I suggest they didn't lie, they simply repeated information guiven to them by the Ministry of Health. The problem here is the culture and attitude of the senior levels of management within government Ministries and Departments. They don't want to identify problems because they are perceived as not career enhancing. The leadership would have just repeated their last position, refusing to admit they might be wrong (almost to death), while the minions within would have been scrambling to assemble a more acceptable 'truth'.
My experience in these organisations is that being blunt, direct, frank and having integrity are not necessarily career enhancing attributes. They just piss too many people off.
Murray86, this is not the first time you are raising this point: leaders do not lie, but they are lied to by their staff. Come on mate. If you know it, shouldnt the Prime Minister and other politicians that are appointed? they are not subject matter experts on anything. So it must be their priority to ensure that they get reliable and evidence based advice. This is not the first time that Jacinda has come out lying. She did the same with the COVID19 testing regime (the early days) and said that it was the front line doctors who refused sending people to test (when it was known to everyone in NZ who contacted the MOH number that the MOH had set up a criteria for testing).
There is this irony in slogans and names sometimes. The more you lack (or despise) a quality the slogan or name suggests, the more emphasis using it in your communications. The weakest person is called Hercules. A government like North Korea is called Democratic Republic and Jacinda said she wants to have an open and transparent government.
It is the style of leadership that is the issue. Many of these positions are highly politicised, so not singing the company song can be bad for your career health. But a good leader will want to hear the bad news first because they will understand that this is what will bite them. they would then formulate a plan to fix it and then deliver both the news and the plan up the chain. But the politicisation of the organisation can be below the very top as well, and not apparent to the very top. But it comes down to culture, and a good leader should be able to embed a positive culture. the problem is 'good leaders' are a bit like hens teeth, there just are not that many of them.
A friend of mine who works for MoE presented a plan he was working on to a National minister just after Labour lost in the Helen Clark days.
He said 'here you go, you can get your people to look this over' as he did with Labour. The minister replied, 'why, this is your job and if it dosen't work it's on your head. Do you want to take another look before resubmitting?'
A totally different style of management.
Labour is 'managing' the MoH and the buck stops with them.
Non-responsibility is a big part of the picture too Kezza. So many in the senior positions are just too afraid to admit they are wrong. It's just not a good look. After all they are paid very, very good money to be right. So mistakes must always be attributable to someone else. Not a very good leadership trait.
Situation is such that probability of recuuring is much higher despit all measures as need just one slip unless under curfew.
Still compare to rest of world is not that bad.
Still feel worst is yet to come economically as what is happening now is all for QE but for how long as ultimately fundamental had to catch up.
thats right and it has cost a lot of people their jobs and livelyhoods, we sacrificed a lot in the L4. We should of known as the government can't deliver anything, and that this would be stuffed up. Now we have potential to go L4 again with the same talk..go hard go early...we did that Cindy...we did that..this time it's a fail on your watch.
Not inevitable, incompetent. It's not hard to isolate everyone coming into the country, just keep them separated from everyone who isn't wearing PPE for 2 weeks. But it does require leadership that is capable of effective thinking, planning and delivery of results, which is just not in the Coalition's DNA.
Can you point to any program or policy that the Coalition have delivered as counter to my comment? Face facts, they, as individuals and collectively just don't have the experience or personalities required to be effective at producing results. It's hard and requires a lot of discipline and focus.
This family caught it from some unidentified source - so there are definitely more out there, and some contacts of this family are also showing symptoms, a lot of asymptomatic carriers means no way of identifying everyone who has it - only masks or lockdown can stop it.
Correct - Also on that basis - 99% it was Labour's management that we went for 102 days without any new case in community.
Why is it so hard to understand that we can try to control but not avoid. Can try to minimize the damage but to expect no damage in current situation is stupidity.
Once in community, chances of second wave being much more harsh is more so will have to wait and see, how it progress as also expecting lockdown to be extended as this virus has 14 days timeframe to reflect and now did only 3 days lockdown for political reason with hope that will not have more but is unlikely and will see more numbers now in coming days.
Logic says that it is highly likely that we will see more community transmition in the next couple of weeks.
Allowing people to leave Alk without testing or self isolation once they get home before knowing what we are dealing with is a country wide outbreak in progress.
When has it been acceptable to not point out bad management?
Labour has a long list of mismanagement.
I would point it out with any Party. I do not subscribe to 'my team, your team', I just want effective management.
Sorry if that ruffles a few feathers but I do not find it acceptable.
BUT if it is pointing out Labours mismanagement and non delivery it is a direct attack on Labour, which is ot the case but the naritive is screwed arround.
Panic buying is a direct example of a lack of faith in Labours ability to tell us what us actually going on, mismanagement and their non delivery.
Liquidity is particularly thin at this part of the summer holiday season. Won't pick up until first week of September.
News like this could have also triggered some unwinding - Putin Approves First Covid-19 Vaccine Even as Trials Go On
Yes. Have you figured out yet that WHEN things get really nasty liquidity is going to be all that matters ( liquidity that can acquire other stuff to survive on), and under those circumstances, mass selling of all stores of asset 'wealth' is going to happen?
It won't just be precious metals, but art, cars, shares and, yes, the Big One....property.
Could be, if one can find a buyer!
But when HUGE joblessness hits not only the USA but The World, and yes New Zealand, what will an ounce of gold be worth ( you know, the real stuff not imaginary contracts that will have little or no value)?
To those with no job/debt commitments - anything. And if those are some of the buyers in today's fragile world, then there turns a whole heap of eager buyers into 'reluctant' sellers.
(Example: What is an ounce of gold worth to someone in Beiruit who has just had their apartment blow to pieces? Answer: Whatever they can get for it IF there is another buyer amongst those similarly devastated)
We aren't talking about tens of millions of globally unemployed or even hundreds, but billions.
Indeed - What Is A Dollar?
Election is 6 weeks away. Govt still has the votes (unless NZF crosses floor, and they might given their terrible polling), to stick to the status quo, and why would they do something that is counter to their interests in delaying when they have effectively silenced the opposition and their ability to campaign, while simultaneously receiving maximum daily unopposed exposure for their front-woman.
I really hate election season in interest.co.nz comments. The quality of commentary takes a real downward turn into puerility. A bunch of grown men descend into childish tirades, throwing insults and toys out of the pram.
What I wouldn't give for less name calling and more rational, reasoned debate.
Gingerninja: I've long had an image of you as a probably small, energetic, opionated, red-headed lady who if we ever met I would find most tiring. And worse than that you attempted a demolition of at least one of my comments in the past - it still rankles months later. So I read the above comment instinctively searching for a way of contradicting you. Can't find any. It would be good if I could argue that the name calling, puerile comments might be from teenage girls or retired grandmothers but sadly unconvincing.
Interest.co.nz warns us of the 'Total' and 'New' comments so why not include a 'Cindy' quotient so we can skip the more irrational debates.
There are powerful, unspoken rules that dictate the way men speak and treat women, (not all men but %99). Woman don't have that limiter and can pretty much say what they want and get away with it. Men are trapped by manners.
I have a good friend in California who is an engineer with Apple, super smart, phd in plastics. We get on so well, her and her husband are best friends of my family. We have big debates about democrats vs republican, even she admits that Ca has gone wrong under democrat leaders. Strongly anti gun, but where she lives is getting violent, with a murder nearly every night ,they live in an isolated conclave.
She works in a male dominated world, yet can debate without resorting to cheap shots, boy has she hit glass ceilings, best bit was when the US army drafted her, to work on tanks.
I was literally just thinking the same thing GN as I was skimming through the banal bi-partisan dross. If you have voted the same party all your life I'm totally uninterested in your contribution as you are evidently unable to evaluate the merits of a candidate/party on their respective merits. Every party waxes and wanes.
Screaming mantra-chanters (who seem to get worse spelling-wise as evening draws on) aside;
https://thetyee.ca/Analysis/2020/07/16/Exponential-Growth-Proving-Letha…
Let's put the virus in context, eh?
Exponential growth of anything forever is impossible except in a mathematicians formula. However exponential growth is not necessarily a sign of disaster ahead. For millions of years a man couldn't move faster than a horse and then Stephenson's steam engine changed society - from 1830 when one of its competitors was a railway with horse drawn wagons the speed of steam engines experienced exponential growth for about 20 years and then it steadied off reaching 100mph. Same with commercial aircraft; in 1903 the flew with people running along watching them and by the 1950s they were getting near the speed of sound and since then little has changed to speeds.
There is evidence that population growth in the developed world is the same; leveling off and declining. But I suspect we agree that it is too little too late.
One New York Times article written in March 1930 sounds way too familiar:
The action of open-market rates for credit, combined with the lowering of the British bank rate last week, had clearly pointed to such a move [in stocks]. The desire of the country’s banking authorities to do everything possible to stimulate business is conceded to be the motive behind the Federal Reserve’s aggressive easy-money policy.
The difference, as Milton Friedman and Anna Scwartz would show decades later, was (and is) that monetary policy might have been uniformly called “easy-money” throughout the press but in actual practice it had been entirely opposite. Link
"'As the year rolled on, though, there continued the steady stream of loud, authoritative voices to sound out this cautious optimism. The message of “just hang in there” was one which reverberated throughout. And it wasn’t like it was out of line or out of order. As Alfred Sloan, President of General Motors, said in September 1930, “Business has turned a corner and is now on a slow but sure return to normal conditions.”
The President of GM (and the mountain of others like him) would surely know what he was talking about.
Most people were and still are willing to give “easy-money” policy as well as the typical array of government rescues the benefit of the doubt – at first.""
Channeling Dan Andrew's
Hipkins defended the steps taken at the border to try to prevent Covid-19 get into the community.
"All of the precautions that are required at the border have been taken," Hipkins said.
"We don't know at this point where this family have contracted the virus from... We are leaving no stone unturned to find out where they would have picked it up from."
We don't need a part time Health Minister, it's not a job you do for work experience.
The comments about border are strange, unless he is looking to separate border and quarantine hotels. Either way it doesn't look good for Megan, or PM - you had one job.
More full us thinking the kiwibuilders could rigg it up. International Twitter we are coping a huge mocking.
Shoutout to MoH, more people got this mornings phone alert, than last nights - how does that work.
Note Judith would be in favor of postponing elections. Shes not silly, she knows the govt support has peaked and will drop over time as it becomes apparent that we have just completed a massively expensive can kicking exercise.
My money is still on the Swedish model being proven correct..
Well that provides a nice noise to cover up the RBNZ statement today and allow the extension of mortgage holidays, everyone on the ‘never never’ by Christmas and a cut in the OCR eventually to minus 1%. More wage subsidies on the way so choose to work or don’t it’s entirely up to you. Whoops do to Jacinda’s socialist experiment where everyone gets a hand.. didn’t she buy at the top of the market in Mount Albert too? Having fallen for the ‘rockstar’ bollocks of the previous administration. All it was was a mountain of debt created as we tried to compete with Chinese funny money.
Good Excuse and reason to print and throw money. More ammunation to fire up asset class / Gap between economy fundamentals widen.
Uncertain times as mentioned before with no one knowing the outcome / future. So hope for the best and prepare for the worst and if possible to control FOMO before jumping to buy stocks and house as have been lucky till now but is it advisable to extend and test the luck.
The usual privileged, greedy, selfish, blinkered, echo chamber, egotistical spruikers have been telling us it was all over too? They were copy and pasting our previous comments about house price predictions and telling us how we were all wrong about how the housing market would be affected because the "Raging Global Pandemic" was somehow over in NZ and what the world was increasingly going through would somehow have no negative affect on us?
Lower price arguement.
Looking like we will go negitive OCR, cheaper to borrow. More mortgage / rent holidays / money handouts and uncertainty.
Higher price arguement.
Putting your money in houses is safe(ish). Other investments look shaky. Kiwis returning home with bucks.
No one knows, the old rule book is in tatters.
Mate has just sold his lower mid price range edge of CBD recently refurbished townhouse in a block of four. Boxy two level, fairly plain. Agent was deluged with enquiry, over 50 groups through the last open home, had to put in place traffic control to regulate flow of people going through. Multiple offers at asking price. Sold to one of the offshore group that media describe as '"kiwis" returning home'.
Airport mentioned
https://www.odt.co.nz/news/national/two-workplaces-shut-workers-showing…
The Auckland Regional Public Health Service, the Ministry of Health and the All-of-Government response is keeping mum about which businesses have been affected by this latest outbreak.But an unnamed business with three sites across Auckland with links to the airport is now closed with one worker testing positive and several others falling ill.
Well we see now, the PMs obsession, looks like the hair-trigger of lock down is going to repeat and repeat, until
https://youtu.be/zj3d1oBj3Wo
PM painted us all into a corner!
Im so disappointed. I thought the readers on this site would be educated but reading the comments here is hugely depressing about general level of intelligence even on this business site. Wonder what is worse, stuff comments or interest?
Question: Did interest NZ ever do a survey on their user demographics? (Profession, Age, Political Afficiation etc)
They are still human GenY, and despite themselves and their own opinion on their abilities to think, their polarisations come through. Many are blinded by their own ideology. Many are very good at shooting messengers and few are able to filter through to what the messages are. Just human really, with all their fallibilities.
UK wages are falling in both real and nominal terms
https://notayesmanseconomics.wordpress.com/2020/08/11/uk-wages-are-fall…
One of the units at 102 Kohi Rd sold for 2.3mm this morning. First sign I've seen of cracks in the new build sector. 4 bed nicely finished new home with a decent quality lift. Developer been trying to sell 4 different units in the block at tender, negn etc but this was the only one they have managed to sell.
Wait for the ripple as this was a very well finished unit.
Housing Market L3 & L2
https://www.oneroof.co.nz/news/38264
Returning to the Interesting stuff, surely the latest kerfuffle is gonna haveta screw up the PREFU due out next week from Treasury. Unless there are last minute revisions. T'would be fascinating to see an edits timeline, because foobarring Auckland for another x weeks cannot fail to show up in the National Accounts somewhere....surely?
And then there's the Orracle show at 1500 today - the latest MPS. Gosh, it will need some last-minute trips through the Spin Cycle, too....
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