Business: oil and gas prices, and the Warkworth to Te Hana highway

Time out to talk business, thanks to our partners, Forsyth Bar, oil and gas prices have stabilised overnight.

Its markets get to grips with a surprise guarantee from Donald Trump to protect and ensure the

Arabian Gulf shipping. Garth Bray, host of Healdon, our business is within the desk, good morning.

Good morning. So, is it, can you take a truth social post from Trump to the bank?

Or to the courts, if you're trying to set out an insurance, settle an insurance claim?

Probably not, and that's why the markets are sort of scrambling on this one in the background.

But in the foreground, I mean, if we look at the, I think there's a chart there that shows the oil prices

of sort of stabilised a wee bit there, the Brent Crude there, which is sort of hanging around about

81 something, 81, 60 I think last time I looked. And that's sort of since this kind of thing took

off. I mean, that was, you know, there was some prices spiking at the pumps in the US and the

farmers and so on were paying, I think, 23% increase in diesel fuel prices, so that was starting to feed

through. And your gas prices as well have come back, we're going to be charred on that showing that

the European benchmark there again has drifted back, although it had really, really spiked up

in the past sort of few days on news that those ports are going to be constrained. But yeah,

you're right. So, this truth social post basically saying that he, Donald Trump, ordered the United

States Development Finance Corporation to provide it a very reasonable price, political risk

insurance and guarantees, financial security of all maritime trade especially energy.

The traders are going, well, what does this mean? If it's a Chinese cargo in a European vessel,

are you going to back that? This is not usually what the DFC is useful. The background of this,

though, is that I think it about midday today, our time. A lot of guarantees on shipping are coming

off because about half of the insurers, these are risk pools, you know, you're Lloyd's and those

kinds of people that guarantee maritime shipping, those guarantees were ending. If you are a ship

and you don't have insurance, you're dead in the water. No one's going to take you into port,

you're not going to push ahead, you can't do anything, you are dead in the water. And we had a real

risk, I think, one quite detailed analysis I was looking over last night saying this was going to be

like the GFC basically where you couldn't get a price on things, not that it will be too expensive,

the whole market would collapse and you'd start to see oil futures go. So, in steps Trump to go,

oh, we don't want that happening because I've got midterms and I'm worried about affordability.

The market's trading on us at the moment, but let's actually see the detail.

Yeah, hundreds out of it, right? All right, very good. Let's move to Nicola Willis.

Well, and actually, Anna Bremen from the Reserve Bank on the cash thing that they've came out

with us last week said we need more cash machines, we need more bank branches.

And well, we're talking about people being blindsided. This is obviously we had Kiwi Banks,

Steve Yurkiewicz saying, I was saying, hey, we weren't expecting this one. I think you had

Nicola Willis admitting it wasn't too tidy. We've had Anna Bremen, the new Reserve Bank

governor emitting this week. This is some work that Andy McDonald, the senior finance

correspondent, BD, has been chasing. And admitting, yes, we got that one wrong. We didn't give

us sufficient notice. And some questions coming because Anna Bremen talked about this the day before

the release just very briefly at lunch with senior bank executives, but didn't communicate it fully.

Either she didn't understand it was important enough to explain, or maybe she wasn't across the

full detail herself before it rolled out, which is all early stages. I think Nicola Willis saying,

look at shows, she's committed a transparency that she's sort of lying down off that.

But yeah, she's, I guess it's going to touch you one and more importantly, I guess Willis saying that

she expects that the banks will be heard on this, which is quite a turnaround from this government

that said it was going to sort of smash them effectively last year, or certainly give them a hard time.

Hey, very quickly. We're actually heading to Susan Botting Next, who's an author and reporter

to get there. You've got to go on that new, beautiful new expressway. But the second bit,

walk with to Tehanna. It's going to cost 2.1 billion, I think, and the government's going to have to

chip in a 10-year loan to NZTA. There's this Thomas Manch business desk infrastructure reporter,

because basically our markets aren't deep enough for three big consortiums to each independently

go out and get back as for what will be currently be sort of six or seven billion dollars worth of

private debt to say we can go and do this. The government's effectively got a step in and get this

thing going even though it's meant to be a public private partnership where the private firms take

on the risk and put it on their balance sheet. Just a bit of a sign that maybe our pool is not that

deep. Well, that's not very good. We want to go all the way to find a day soon, don't we?

Well, that's 100k and that's something like about 15 billion, so that'll be a real deep pool.

All right. Thanks, Garth. You're all now business, so it's Garth Bray. We talk business every day,

thanks to our partners for South Bali.