Confidence among firms fell 2 points to 54 in ANZ’s latest business outlook survey, while the measure of businesses’ own activity fell just 1 point to 48.<\/p>\n
A reading of over 50 in the survey is traditionally very strong and suggests far more businesses expect economic conditions to improve than to get worse.<\/p>\n
ANZ’s research team said confidence and own activity stayed high in August, but what was most encouraging this month was a lift in past activity.<\/p>\n
The survey’s measure of past activity was 6 points to 16, thanks to a strong showing by the services sector this month.<\/p>\n
ANZ said this suggests the bounce-back is already underway.<\/p>\n
The survey showed inflation expectations were mixed, with oil prices continuing to have a large impact on the data.<\/p>\n
Inflation expectations lifted from 3.14 percent to 3.26 percent, and more firms are expecting cost increases and to raise their own prices.<\/p>\n
But ANZ said the size of expected cost increases is getting smaller.<\/p>\n
Employment intentions were up slightly on the previous month’s numbers.<\/p>\n
ANZ said overall the survey painted a picture of firms keen to get on with things despite a volatile global economic backdrop.<\/p>\n
It said while cost and pricing intentions remained elevated, there was widespread optimism that the worst was past and that the economy was getting back on track.<\/p>\n
Monday’s survey comes ahead of the Reserve Bank’s Monetary Policy Statement on Wednesday, where it is widely tipped to increase the cost of borrowing by 0.25 percent to 2.75 percent.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Confidence among firms fell 2 points to 54 in ANZ’s latest business outlook survey, while the measure of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":585553,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11],"tags":[138,219,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-585552","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\/585552","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=585552"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/585552\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/585553"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=585552"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=585552"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=585552"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}