ASB broke away from the ranks and started hiking its floating and short-term mortgage rates last Friday after a week long stand-off between banks following the OCR increase.
ASB hiked its floating and six-month rates by 25 basis points to 6.00% and 6.10% respectively and it also increased its one-year rate by 10 basis points to 6.45%.
These hikes were quickly followed by the other banks and some non-bank lenders.
Kiwibank also launched a capped floating rate option this week priced at 6.50% for one year.
To read about all the rate changes click here.
In Expert Views BNZ economist Tony Alexander says if ASB had not kicked off mortgage rate increases, then the Reserve Bank would have started thinking in terms of boosting the Official Cash Rate (OCR) 0.5% in July simply to force the response it wanted.
