ANZ (Australia and New Zealand Banking Group)

in your trucks.

This is this cute little measure that the ANZ does each month.

The light traffic and the heavy traffic index.

Light traffic gives you a bit of a gauge on people running around the place and consumer demand.

My quick three, and it's repetitive in a sense in the first one, is there is an incredibly dangerous combination at the moment, in my opinion, of government high interest rates and bonds and oil going over $100.

And your ANZ podcast today was excellent on that.

I think, and this is not an investment advice, but we need to be thinking, individuals need to be thinking about how do I protect myself about the risk level at the moment.

Secondly, was the warning about AI, including from the godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton.

Hi everyone, I'm Debbie Roberts, owner and financial advisor at Property Apprentice.

In today's episode of the Week in Review, we're breaking down why major banks lifted variable rates following the latest 25 basis points OCR hike, key lessons for Kiwi buyers from Australia's deepening housing downturn, and National's proposal to expand the 5% deposit first home loan scheme income threshold up to $300,000.

Plus, we explore what Barfoot & Thompson's latest August sales figures reveal about Auckland's market sitting at a potential tipping point, and a new bill that fixes a long-standing KiwiSaver loophole for farm and service tenancy workers.

We've got a lot of great insights to cover off today, so let's dive in.

First up, from One News on the 3rd of September, all major banks hike floating mortgage rates.

All five of New Zealand's major banks, that's ANZ, BNZ, ASB, Westpac and Kiwibank, increased their variable mortgage rates by 25 basis points following the Reserve Bank's OCR hike to 2.75%.

The central bank's rate increase came as June quarter inflation reached 4.1%, with inflation projected to return to the 1% to 3% target band by the middle of next year as broader economic activity recovers.

New variable home loan rates across the major lenders now range between 6.25% and 6.49%, while fixed rate mortgages remain pretty much unchanged.

So they sort of see that November hike as the base case.

Yeah, compared to the other banks, NAB is forecasting a September hike, which would be very soon, while CBA and ANZ are also sort of steering towards November.

So yeah, it's getting to the pointy end.

Pointy

When we come back, we'll look at what's happening with some of the lenders, what's happening with some of the ad creators, and we'll get into that just after this.

So the merger activity that had been ploughing along the last few years, still kind of coming into different levels of maturity.

And this week we heard from Suncorp and ANZ as they were kind of taking the next step in their merger.

Charlie, what's the lowdown with this?

NAB says a hike this month.

ComBank, ANZ and Westpac say a hike by November.

All of them pointing to 4.6%.

The market agrees.

And yet not one major lender has actually lifted their fixed rate recently.

A one-year fixed rate with the likes of ING is sitting at 6.24%.

Two years, ME Bank, ANZ, NAB, they're all around 6%.

0.24 to 6.34.

Um, but also, you know, keep an eye out for if they're trying to sort of spoof these things.

You know, this account that was putting out these ads of me, it said it was part of ANZ, uh, which I'm pretty sure ANZ isn't happy that they're getting drawn into this either.

But as soon as I clicked onto that account, it comes up with children's clothing store.

So just a couple of little clicks of, you know, is everything lining up here from what I'd expect? A quick Google, who is this person? And making sure it's actually them and that they actually have credentials.

That means that if you bought a typical property in Melbourne five years ago, your property is worth less than you bought it for, while properties in many other areas, they've risen by hundreds hundreds of thousands of dollars.

And are price falls about to change? Well, according to the big banks, Westpac see Melbourne prices falling 4% this year and ANZ, well, they think the Melbourne property market will fall 12.8% from its peak to its low point.

So it's not looking very pretty for the Melbourne property market right now.

If we look at what's happening on the ground, it reflects exactly what the data shows.

We also know that the US Fed meets next week.

And now economists at ANZ here expect there to be three 25 basis point interest rate increases with the US Federal Reserve starting from December.

What do you think? Is that likely? And what does it mean for investors?

Yeah, really good question.