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

Or, you know, if you're the Reserve Bank, like in 2020, get rid of those LVRs and those DTIs, those, you know, loan-to-value ratio controls or those debt-to-income multiple controls.

You know, get the Reserve Bank to reduce the capital requirements for the banks.

All of those things you could do.

It would really be saying, OK...

Let's give up on being a real economy with investment in actual businesses and skills and trying to increase our productivity.

We're not really trying to do that.

We actually just want to go around and around again on that horse of the housing market.

And I don't think many people want to do that.

But it's amazing what happens when the pressure comes on.

And I actually don't think that New Zealand can handle the truth.

If you look at the history of our economy and our politics, actually, there has never been a government re-elected at a time when real house prices are falling.

So in 2008, we saw the replacement of the Clark government.

2017, when Bill English's government left, both of those times house prices were falling.

Again, in 2023, house prices were falling.

And so house prices are falling now in real terms, and they have been for a year or two.

Well, I'm saying if I was the government and I understood what it is that gets people elected, I would be thinking maybe I should be firing things up again.

It may not be easy for them to do that because some of those levers they don't control directly, but certainly there will be some discomfort amongst the politicians.

The other thing, of course, is that scarily,

When you look at the correlations between petrol prices, consumer confidence, and confidence in the government, they're all remarkably aligned.

So when you see petrol prices go up, people's consumer confidence goes down, as you'd expect.

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