April 09: RBNZ cuts OCR to 2.5%
The RBNZ cut the official cash rate by 50 basis points to 2.5%. This wasn’t to surprising. However, the statement was a hell of a lot more dovish than I expected, especially:
We expect to keep the OCR at or below the current level through until the latter part of 2010.
So the RBNZ is stating that it will leave the OCR at or below 2.5% until LATE-2010. That is a commitment to expansionary policy for quite sometime. In that case, the RBNZ’s outlook for economic activity must have deteriorated substantially for late 2009 and 2010.
I have to stop trading iPredict OCR stocks on what I’d do instead of what Bollard’s likely to do….
@Eric Crampton
Amen to that 🙂
lol! I think a few people would have been burnt this morning.
Let it be known that I called this one:
http://www.tvhe.co.nz/2009/04/02/why-does-the-rbnz-want-to-stop-long-rates-going-up/#comment-18674
@goonix
50 was pretty dominate for a while on ipredict
@Miguel Sanchez
Hi Miguel,
There interest rate track still sounds endogenous from the statement – it just sounds like they have revised down growth for an additional 9-12 months, which would imply that the endogenous OCR should be below 2.5% 🙂