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 · last 12 months

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

So that's frustrating for the Reserve Bank.

And increasingly, remember, we are –

We are an economy, but actually we're more of a housing market with bits tacked on.

And that means that when the housing market has been dead for a long time in terms of not increasing in value, in fact, for a bunch of people, particularly Auckland and Wellington, not so much Christchurch or Queenstown.

You know, they're looking at 15%, 20% down, and in fact, more like 30% down when you talk about real house prices.

And that's unprecedented for a lot of people.

This is a whole new world and means that they're being more conservative.

I actually think the Reserve Bank has underestimated the effect of that wealth effect on people's consumption.

And if you look at some other economies, Japan, for example, they had what they call a balance sheet recession for a long time, which is where people weren't spending and people couldn't work it out.

Well, they didn't feel very wealthy because the value of their shares or their house had gone down so much.

And that's certainly an issue here in New Zealand.

Yeah.

It feels like there's a moment of truth happening here.

Can we handle the truth that our economy doesn't really work unless we've got house prices taking off?

Now, you could solve that problem by making house prices take off again.

And I'm sure there's a bunch of people who say, just do whatever you need to do.

Stop building new houses.

Stop...

Rezoning places to get lots more supply into them.

Get lots more migrants in.

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