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Rodney Dickens claims the pressures building in our labour markets bring a...
By Rodney Dickens*Employment growth has turned out to be dramatically stronger than predicted by my old employer, the Reserve Bank and the economic forecasters more generally; and the same will happen...
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Rodney Dickens suggests how you should assess the numerous surveys and market...
By Rodney Dickens*One of the useful things the bank economists do is report a range of indicators including business surveys, consumer surveys, labour market-related indicators, commodity prices...
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Rodney Dickens sees interest rates having to be increased to a level that...
By Rodney Dickens*NZ is doomed to experiencing major housing cycles in part because of the link between interest rates and migration and the tendency for the Reserve Bank to conduct misguided monetary...
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Rodney Dickens thinks underfunding of Statistics NZ is bringing a higher...
By Rodney Dickens*Anyone vaguely familiar with how much of the official economic data are derived will have a healthy scepticism of the accuracy of the official numbers.Too often the bank economists...
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Rodney Dickens says the huge disparities between reported GDP and employment...
By Rodney Dickens*As is normal, interest.co.nz kindly reproduced the last Raving in which I aired my concern about the quality of some official statistics.Statistics NZ (SNZ) provided a thoughtful...
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Rodney Dickens shows the NZD does not move in response to American benchmark...
By Rodney Dickens*In the Morning Brief provided by ASB Securities on Friday was a link to an NBR article in which an economist was reported as saying that interest rate hikes by the Fed would result in...
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Rodney Dickens says now that tourism is vying with dairying as our number one...
By Rodney Dickens*Tourism competes with dairying as New Zealand's largest export earner making it an important industry when assessing economic growth prospects among other things.This Raving looks at...
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Auckland house price rises following Housing Accord to ‘boost supply’ means...
By Rodney Dickens*Despite the Auckland Housing Accord delivering 154 Special Housing Areas that are supposed to deliver more than 60,000 new dwelling sites, since it was ratified in October 2013 the...
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Rodney Dickens questions the threat technology poses to employment, noting...
By Rodney Dickens*Many jobs that exist today will be displaced by technology.But there is nothing new in this.Manufacturing is an industry where technology has already decimated many jobs. Despite...
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Rodney Dickens says the effective OCR is well over double the 1.75% actual...
By Rodney Dickens*We still live in the shadow of the financial crisis. For example, high debt levels in the crisis countries mean international interest rates will remain much lower than "normal" for a...
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Rodney Dickens says there won't be a major catch-up phase for residential...
By Rodney Dickens*Conventional wisdom is that there is a huge unsatisfied demand for new housing especially in Auckland implying the potential for a major catch-up phase for residential building.Such a...
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Rodney Dickens looks at what drives global inflation, what drives New Zealand...
By Rodney Dickens*In the last two Monetary Policy Statements the Reserve Bank included alternative scenarios for the OCR in addition to the central scenario that involved roughly one OCR hike in...
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Rodney Dickens sees a risk that a cut to permanent migration will weigh on...
By Rodney Dickens*When time permits between writing reports, doing contract work for clients and the on-going project to modernised our tired website, I do background research to further my...
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Rodney Dickens says the business confidence surveys have major political...
By Rodney Dickens*The ANZ business survey has gone AWOL again.Unfortunately, the bank economists and therefore the media haven't focused enough on the massive political bias that currently overwhelms...
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Rodney Dickens says section prices are the key to solving the housing...
By Rodney Dickens*Maybe reflecting vested interests and complacency, National's housing policies did nothing to solve the affordability problem.In the case of Auckland this is evidenced by section...
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Rodney Dickens doubts landlords' costs drive rents, suggesting it's more...
By Rodney Dickens*With the government targeting housing investors and landlords, rental housing has become a bit of a hot topic and it shouldn't be a surprise there have been claims the result will be...
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Rodney Dickens says higher construction demand will soon attract building...
By Rodney Dickens*A somewhat heated debate is unfolding regarding the government's plan to boost residential building via especially the KiwiBuild plan.The conventional wisdom appears to be that...
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Rodney Dickens checks how reliable economic forecasters' employment growth...
By Rodney Dickens*A review of the predictions for employment growth by the economic forecasters reveals that they are pretty good as long as employment growth is about to head to around average rates;...
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Rodney Dickens says be wary of MBIE's National Construction Pipeline reports,...
By Rodney Dickens*Annually since 2013 MBIE has released the National Construction Pipeline report. The reports include forecasts for national and regional residential building, non-residential building...
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Rodney Dickens criticises Auckland Council's economists, claiming their...
By Rodney Dickens*Special events are the mainstay of news but too often economists also give excessive weight to them.This appears to be the case with Auckland Council's (AC's) chief economist's...
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