ANZ holds back rate cut on funding cost rocket

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From the AFR, it’s ANZ’s turn to take in the team:

ANZ Bank is the only big four bank that will not pass on the full value of the Reserve Bank’s 0.25 percentage point reduction in official interest rates to home loan customers, blaming the decision on higher funding costs.

Instead, ANZ Bank will reduce its home loan rates by 0.19 of a percentage point, with its benchmark rate for owner-occupiers falling to 5.37 per cent.

ANZ’s move came after National Australia Bank, Westpac, Commonwealth Bank and Bank of Queensland said they would pass on the full RBA cut to their home loan customers.

…ANZ’s group executive for Australia, Fred Ohlsson, said it would reduce small business lending rates by the full 0.25 of a percentage point, as well as raising rates on four-month term deposits and cutting a two-year fixed mortgage rate.

“The background is that wholesale funding costs have again been rising in recent months,” he said.

“While we’ve absorbed this for some time and taken steps to reduce costs in our own business, higher funding costs mean we are only in a position to pass on a portion of the reduction in the cash rate to our customers.”

About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.