Pretty benign economic news

The pre-election economic update from Treasury yesterday had no big surprises and appears to have done little to change any forecasts around future interest rate moves. Perhaps the more important release was the Reserve Bank's survey of inflation expectations. As usual, the big focus was on respondents’ views on annual CPI inflation. For the year ahead these eased from 2.08% to to 1.96%, while the forecast for two years ahead was moderated from 2.36% to 2.23%. This put the one-year view close to the mid-point of the RBNZ’s 1.0 to 3.0% target range, while the two-year view was still riding a bit above this.

The only home loan rate changes today are little ones to Housing New Zealand's offers.