Greg Smith

Casual person-to-person spread is almost very rare.

Sounds like fun.

Yeah, I think there were some encouraging aspects.

Obviously, we're going to hear from the main man in about 15 minutes, Jerome Powell.

But, yeah, she had the chance to speak yesterday.

Talked about the central bank walking a tightrope, I suppose, not alone.

Inflation is back above target, although not...

No idea where the Aussies are, we'll get to that in a minute.

But yeah, look, head-on inflation, 3.1%, it's above their band, but she's downplaying it as a largely fuel-driven event, not broad-based.

So core inflation, that's stable, that's the key signal, so that's encouraging.

They're looking through the oil shock, that's encouraging.

We don't know where the war's going to go, of course.

And she said that holding the OCR at 2.25% reflects a balancing act, not overreacting.

So, look, no real surprises, but I think yesterday it was Michael's about the consistency of the message.

The market still has a clear tightening bias, looking at one potentially in May and certainly July.

So that's building.

Depends on where the Middle East goes, of course.

I thought the other interesting point on the same day was if you look at the actual...

reality for households.

So we know where the CPI is at, but Stats New Zealand released the household living cost price indices, and they showed the cost of living is up just 2.1% in the year to March.