Bernard Hickey

speaker

288 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 12 Jul

Bernard Hickey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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The Prosperity Project · Why mortgage rates don’t follow the OCR · 12 Jul 2026 podcast

They've

and around the world who are saying to them, give them as much as you possibly can.

Then they've also got their own wholesale funding requirements.

For example, they may have gotten some cheap money from the Reserve Bank in 2020 and 2021, but then they had to pay it back.

So there's a lot going on under the surface there.

Trying to unravel the ball of twine is quite difficult.

But on the whole, our banks are quite profitable.

They have increased their profits over the last five to 10 years on average.

And for them to increase it again, that would be quite provocative, I think.

I think sometimes there's some competition.

I remember the good old days of the unbeatable campaign way back in the mid-2000s, 2005, 6, 7, and BNZ was out there really pushing hard for mortgage share because at that point they didn't use mortgage brokers.

Now, a lot of banks now use mortgage brokers, and that's where the competitive action happens, and therefore we don't see it.

In fact, the banks don't really advertise their rates that much in a way because banks

because of the increase in the importance of mortgage brokers, it doesn't matter whether you advertise in the paper or on TV or anything, the mortgage broker is the one you need to influence, not necessarily the direct person.

So it doesn't look like there's a lot of competition.

You also see sometimes, you know, for tactical reasons, very short term, you might see deals being offered, these cashback deals.

There were a lot of those last year, and that prompted quite a bit of switching between banks.

But on the whole, you'd have to say in the long run, and according to the

the market studies that the Commerce Commission has done and the research that the Reserve Bank has done, our banks, the big four, are not as competitive and haven't competed prices or profits lower in the way that you see in other countries.

And that's partly because we don't have the e-banks, you know, the new –

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