The New Zealand stock market fell in August by 4.2 percent and 2.2 percent the following month. The market has also dropped by another 3.6 percent in October so far. Goodson went on to explain that the market is under pressure from a pincer movement, as it’s caught between modest…

The housing market appears to be back on the path to recovery as the latest average home value was found to have risen by 0.9 per cent for the three months ending in August. This is according to Quotable Value (QV), whose House Price Index has remained largely unchanged in…

The Banking Ombudsman annual report confirms that about a third of the annual investigations it conducts are now bank-related, with victims suffering an average loss of $57,000 and costing an overall of over $200 million a year. Ombudsman Nicola Sladden said that the sharp increase in banking scams was worrying…

Credit arrears and business liquidations have risen to the highest level seen in the last four months and are headed towards pre-pandemic levels. Credit reporting firm, Centrix, has collected data indicating that 426,000 people were in credit arrears in July, representing 11.7 per cent of the active credit active population.…

In a bid to make the country’s tax system fairer, Minister for Finance, Grant Robertson, has confirmed that the government will be introducing legislation for a proposed digital services tax on large multinationals that make money off of Kiwi users of internet search engines, social media platforms, and online marketplaces.…

Mortgage payments are now accounting for about half of household income for many Kiwis according to a recent CoreLogic Housing Affordability Report. Data shows that mortgage holders were allocating 53 per cent of their income to making mortgage payments in the last quarter of 2022. This has now slightly dropped…

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand (RBNZ) has announced that it will be holding the official cash rate at 5.5 per cent as part of its Monetary Policy Statement. This is in keeping with analysts’ predictions and reaffirms the reserve bank’s position that the rate has reached a high enough…

Poverty and housing advocates are claiming that landlords are capitalising on the high demand and low housing supply to charge tenants higher rates. According to a joint paper released by the Treasury dubbed ‘What Drives Rents in New Zealand?’, landlords are setting rent prices as high as the income of…

An unexpected surge in the official unemployment rate to 3.6% for the June quarter has been linked to a large number of new entrants joining the labour market. This is the second-highest level of unemployment recorded since June 2021 and marks an increment of 0.2% on the 3.4% reached in…

Further proving that the economy is cooling, the annual inflation rate has dipped to 6%, down from 7.2% at the start of the year and registering the third consecutive drop in rates since the record peak achieved in the June quarter of 2022. The quarterly inflation rate has meanwhile reached…