BNZ Weekly Overview, 20 April

Welcome to the April 20 edition of the BNZ Weekly Overview.

The New Zealand dollar has risen slightly over the past week while wholesale interest rates have crept up with a significant cause for both moves being the markets becoming less optimistic about the timing of the Reserve Bank easing monetary policy. More participants are increasingly swinging around to our view that there is no scope to ease monetary policy until extremely late this year. The inflation numbers released this week were bang on expectations but show that the impact of the falling New Zealand dollar has yet to feed through and of course with petrol prices rising strongly in the past few days inflation is going to receive an extra boost.

Best regards

Tony Alexander
Chief Economist

See... BNZ Weekly Overview 20 April 2006

ENDS

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