Water those green shoots

Friday, June 12th 2009, 3:57PM

One of the themes to draw out of the news this week is around economic growth and those “green shoots”.

The Reserve Bank talked about the outlook for the New Zealand economy in its monetary policy statement yesterday and during the week we have run a couple of stories reporting on what fund managers think.

One of the new things we have done this week is launch a new website totally dedicated to home loans. The site at www.mortgagerates.co.nz also has a section on What the experts are saying. Here you can see a summary of economist views and also read their reports. We also introduce a new home loan rate blog. Its first posting questions whether MPs should be telling banks their rates are too high.

Have a look at the site and if you know anyone wanting home loan information give them the mortgagerates.co.nz address.

Another trend at the moment is that we are seeing lots more investment product development – well, far more than last year.

Today we report on Brook closing its Alpha fund to new investment. Fisher Funds has also added another fund to its range and Liontamer has its latest fund in the market.

On Good Returns we have a Special Report on Liontamer’s Australian equities fund which tells you more about this offering. This one is different from earlier Liontamer funds as it has both protected and unprotected units.

KiwiSaver has also been in the news with the closure of the eosaver fund, as Good Returns predicted many months ago.

Our depositrates.co.nz site is running a regular round-up of news on Mondays now.

The other key story in the section is around the preferential share offer from Alan Hawkin’s Cynotech group. This offer has had a fair bit of attention as Hawkins neglected to mention his past, including the Equiticorp failure of the 1980s, in the prospectus.

We speak to Hawkins about this and what he is prepared to do. One does wonder where the authorities are on these sorts of issues.

One area where there has been much news recently is new appointments in the industry. This week has been more active with ING appointing a CFO, insurance old-timer Trappy taking on a new position and a few other appointments pending.

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