Policymakers Do The Rounds

Several RBNZ interviews have hit over the last 90 minutes or so, as a quick recap:

• RBNZ Assistant Governor Hawkesby told RTRS that "our messages around having stimulus in place for a considerable period of time, being patient and our least regret is keeping stimulus in place for too long rather than taking it away too quickly, all of those messages stay in place." He also noted that the RBNZ was aware there were risks in publishing the OCR track as the markets would tend to get ahead of the bank's bias when it came to pricing in tightening. "We also had awareness that it will take some time for markets to remember that these are conditional projections," he added.
• While giving BBG a similar message, he also noted that the RBNZ now believes that the neutral level of the OCR is "somewhere in the order of 2% with wide bands of confidence." On the sequencing of monetary policy tweaks he highlighted that "there is no hard and fast rule connecting our choices about the OCR with the LSAP program, one doesn't have to finish before the other can happen," as he looked to underscore a degree of optionality for the central bank when it comes to normalisation.
• Finally, RBNZ chief economist Yuong Ha told the WSJ that the central bank could
  hike rates in H222, underscoring the message from last week's OCR decision. Ha told the WSJ that "we are getting back to some semblance of normality and in that situation you
  should be looking at raising interest rates, sometime in the second half of
  next year"…"This is what would we expect in a data-dependent scenario where we can sit
  and wait and watch the data and markets can make their own minds up as to what
  it means."