Capturing loan-to-value data in New Zealand – challenges and opportunities
Like many countries, New Zealand experienced rapid increases in both house prices and household debt in the decade leading up to the Global Financial Crisis. While house prices fell modestly during the recession of 2009/10, they remained elevated relative to fundamental metrics such as rents or incomes. By 2013, house prices were rising rapidly again in some parts of the country, particularly Auckland and Canterbury, reflecting both stronger demand and housing shortages. Although the rise in house prices was accompanied by only moderate growth in total household credit, lending undertaken at high loan-to-value ratios (LVRs in excess of 80 percent) had risen to nearly a third of all new housing loan commitments.
An A to Z of loan-to-value ratio (LVR) restrictions
The Reserve Bank recently announced restrictions on high loan-to-value ratio (LVR) lending. The restrictions take the form of a ‘speed limit’ that requires banks to restrict new residential mortgage lending at LVRs of over 80 percent to no more than 10 percent of the dollar value of their new residential mortgage lending. The speed limit on high-LVR lending is designed to slow the growth in house prices and housing credit, and mitigate associated risks to the financial system and the broader economy. This article sets out the framework for LVR restrictions, and explores the Reserve Bank’s early experience in operating them.
Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
This classic is the benchmark against which all modern books about Nietzsche are measured. When Walter Kaufmann wrote it in the immediate aftermath of World War II, most scholars outside Germany viewed Nietzsche as part madman, part proto-Nazi, and almost wholly unphilosophical. Kaufmann rehabilitated Nietzsche nearly single-handedly, presenting his works as one of the great achievements of Western philosophy. Responding to the powerful myths and countermyths that had sprung up around Nietzsche, Kaufmann offered a patient, evenhanded account of his life and works, and of the uses and abuses to which subsequent generations had put his ideas.Without ignoring or downplaying the ugliness of many of Nietzsche's proclamations, he set them in the context of his work as a whole and of the counterexamples yielded by a responsible reading of his books. More positively, he presented Nietzsche's ideas about power as one of the great accomplishments of modern philosophy, arguing that his conception of the "will to power" was not a crude apology for ruthless self-assertion but must be linked to Nietzsche's equally profound ideas about sublimation.He also presented Nietzsche as a pioneer of modern psychology and argued that a key to understanding his overall philosophy is to see it as a reaction against Christianity. Many scholars in the past half century have taken issue with some of Kaufmann's interpretations, but the book ranks as one of the most influential accounts ever written of any major Western thinker.