Kiwi central bank under no pressure to act

Last week, the RBNZ delayed raising rates after the country was put into a Covid-19 lockdown following the outbreak, although policymakers flagged tightening was on the cards before the year was out.

WELLINGTON: The fresh outbreak of the coronavirus in New Zealand is not a “game changer” yet and there is no pressure to act on monetary policy, a senior central bank official said yesterday, as authorities struggle to contain the spread of the delta variant.

“At this stage we don’t see it as a game-changer in the sense that our underlying economic analysis and views should be thrown out of the window and we should start again,” the Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s (RBNZ) chief economist Yuong Ha said in a phone interview with Reuters.