Here’s an interesting point from Bloomberg, saying that the RBNZ’s tightening “is being blunted” by Australian-owned mortgage lenders such as ANZ and Westpac lowering “some fixed mortgage rates by more than a quarter-percentage point since January as the cost of global funding falls”.

More:

  • Says Craig Ebert, senior economist at BNZ, “People forget that it’s retail interest rates that affect the real economy and those have fallen since the Reserve Bank started its hiking process. It wouldn’t have been what the Reserve Bank expected or preferred.” And “Give it another six months at this rate of switching and the Reserve Bank will have an awful lot of people predominantly on fixed rates. They will be immune to whatever the Reserve Bank tries to do with interest rates.”

I think Ebert overstates the case in those last two sentences, but there you go.

More detail at the article (not gated).

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Meanwhile the NZD is dripping lower, off to just above 0.8710 now. More on the NZD from earlier, here and here.