Consumer prices rose in June for the first month since February, said TD Securities in an estimate released today. In it, the brokerage firm stated that inflation came in at 0.4% on the month, dissenting from the previous period’s decline of 0.3%. The 12 months through the end of June saw such prices rise at a slower pace than they had prior, by only 1.4% vs 1.5%. Nonetheless, the slight increase for the month still managed to keep the metric within the Reserve Bank of Australia's 2.0% inflation target.
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand released a report today, on its website, titled “New Zealand Bank Funding Costs and Margins.” The report said that "a large part of the OCR cuts have been passed on to household and business borrowing rates." Since July of 2008, the bank has slashed its overnight cash rate by 600 basis points to 2.50%. Despite this effort, and the its visible results, the mortgage market might not exactly benefit as much as the RBNZ would have appreciated. The statement added that "the spreads between marginal funding costs and floating mortgage rates have widened in recent months to historically high levels." This noted reflection of risk-aversion might "hinder the efforts of monetary policy to stimulate economic activity." It is yet unclear whether such a statement will prelude another rate move down. But for now, one might choose to think that if 600 basis points worth of cuts have failed to ease the pressure on mortgage rates, that yet another move down might not be so effective in easing such a variable.
Governor Masaaki Shirakawa of the Bank of Japan shed some positive, yet cautious, light as to what he feels the direction of the Japanese economy may be. In a speech given in Tokyo at the Quarterly Branch Managers’ Meeting, he stated that the rate of economic deterioration in his country had begun to slow amid an upward turnaround in exports to foreign countries. Nonetheless, he cautioned that economists ought to watch for the downside risks associated with the deflationary environment that they are currently facing.
China's head of the National Bureau of Statistics, Ma Jiantang, says there is no risk of inflation for the country in the remainder of this year, Reuters reported. In a press conference given today, Ma stated his objection to such a notion. The 12 months through the end of of May saw the Asian country's consumer prices decline 1.4% with producer prices plummeting 10.4% in
