Kelvin Davidson

So yeah, pretty cautious sort of statement all round, I guess.

No, no, that's it, as I say, but for everyone.

So, you know, if you're, depending on which camp you're in, you could probably find something for you in this statement.

So pretty balanced.

So that's a much more encouraging sign.

Still a bit of caution, as I say, but it does start to look a little bit better.

Yeah, I suppose when you look across some of the recent indicators, maybe the last week, it does tend to look a bit more positive.

I think there's still reasons for caution.

We had that rise in the unemployment rate a couple of weeks back, for example.

So there's still a wee bit of caution out there.

Some other parts of the economy may be lagging behind just a little bit.

Yeah, the most recent data was actually pretty encouraging.

So we had the New Zealand Activity Index from Stats New Zealand for December.

It was a 1.8% increase in that 12 months to December.

When you look across Q4 as a whole, the average increase was about 2.3%.

So across October, November, December, each result was actually pretty positive.

Now you can sort of do some fiddling behind the scenes and translate that into a quarterly GDP path for those official benchmark numbers.

What that implies is about a 0.6% lift in GDP in the fourth quarter.

So, you know, pretty decent result.

It would be a slowdown from what we had, barring revisions, it would be a slowdown from what we had in Q3, which was 1.1%.