October 09 OCR review: Moving forward gradually

The RBNZ just told us that the OCR is unchanged.  No surprises.  The focus was on what would happen to this statement from September:

We expect such support will be needed for some time. As a result, we continue to expect to keep the OCR at or below the current level through until the latter part of 2010.

Well this happened:

In contrast to current market pricing, we see no urgency to begin withdrawing monetary policy stimulus, and we expect to keep the OCR at the current level until the second half of 2010.

So they have moved from implying they won’t lift rates till the last quarter of 2010 to now implying that the 3rd quarter is the most likely.  Could more positive information shift them earlier?  Maybe.  Will we see a rate increase in January (like the market was pricing in)?  Not likely.