The RBNZ Projected 2.81 for December. It Is 93 Per Cent Priced to Set 3.00 Tonight.
The Reserve Bank of New Zealand's own September projection puts the official cash rate at 2.81 per cent in December 2026.
At 01:00 UTC today it is expected to set 3.00, and one reader puts money-market pricing of that hike at about 93 per cent — the issuer's published track is nineteen basis points under a level the market is near-certain arrives two months early. Forty-five minutes earlier, Australia prints against a Reserve Bank of Australia trimmed-mean forecast of 0.8 per cent that four major banks have already overshot at 0.9 to 1.0. Two central banks, two of their own numbers under the market's, both marked inside the same forty-five minutes. The Australian consensus is also 3.9 and 4.2 at once, and neither is wrong: the Bureau of Statistics releases the September quarter and the September month in the same minute under the same name, and the one field where they agree numerically — trimmed mean at 3.6 — is the field the central bank targets, so a mislabelled series shows no symptom. That is a seventh distinct broken calendar field in six weeks. Then the marking: American consumer confidence printed 91.7 against four published consensus figures spanning 1.2 points, beating all of them by 10.5 to 11.7, so the vendor dispute we have written about for weeks was one-tenth the size of the error — while a 2.3-point prior revision changed the move from 7.5 points to 9.8. New home sales fell 0.6 per cent on the month and beat consensus by four per cent. And the five-year auction is scored against the right tenor for the first time: 4.845 per cent, a 0.4 basis point tail against September's 3.1, with the dealer take down to 10.56.