Consumer confidence has rebounded to levels seen before the latest Middle East conflict, as lower fuel prices helped lift household sentiment.<\/p>\n
But it remained 16 points below its January peak, while any reading below 100 still pointed to pessimism.<\/p>\n
ANZ chief economist Sharon Zollner said the rebound appeared closely linked to falling fuel prices.<\/p>\n
“It’s pretty clear that’s what caused confidence to plummet, and that’s what’s causing it to bounce back,” she said.<\/p>\n
Confidence had now regained almost half of its fall, with both current conditions and future expectations lifting from their recent lows.<\/p>\n
Households remained cautious about their own finances, with a net 10 percent expecting to be better off in a year’s time, down slightly from May but still well above April’s low.<\/p>\n
There were also signs consumers may be becoming less wary about spending.<\/p>\n
The net proportion of households saying it was a bad time to buy a major household item improved by 9 points to minus 11 percent, a measure ANZ said was the best retail indicator and consistent with recovering retail sales.<\/p>\n
Inflation expectations also eased, with two-year-ahead expectations falling from 5.3 percent to 4.6 percent, returning to levels seen before the recent oil price spike.<\/p>\n
The survey showed people were also a little less gloomy about the broader economy.<\/p>\n
Expectations for economic conditions over the next 12 months improved from minus 36 percent to minus 23 percent, the strongest reading since February.<\/p>\n
ANZ said June card spending data would show whether consumers were “putting their money where their mouths are”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Consumer confidence has rebounded to levels seen before the latest Middle East conflict, as lower fuel prices helped…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":507261,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,219,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-507260","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-economy","tag-business","tag-economy","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507260","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=507260"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/507260\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/507261"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=507260"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=507260"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=507260"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}