by Paul McBeth
A floating rate of 8.8 per cent at the ANZ and WestpacTrust? Ouch!
Kicking off the latest round of rate rises, the ANZ responded to last week's OCR hike and put up its mortgage rates. All of them.
By moving its rates yesterday, ANZ upped the ante for floating rates a sizeable 0.7 percentage points, from the previous trading bank average of 8.1 per cent. It's also boosted all its interest rates for fixed term mortgages (see our mortgage table for more details).
Meanwhile, WestpacTrust was the first to follow suit, announcing this morning that its own floating rate would rise to 8.8 per cent "in response to increases in the Official Cash Rate of 0.75 per cent by the Reserve Bank in the last month".The latest rises mean that homeowners with a floating rate mortgage of $100,000 and a 20-year term will have to find something like $500 more each year to meet their repayments.
Economists have been tipping that floating rates will peak anywhere from 9 to 10 per cent, and probably late this year/early 2001.
Earlier story: