THE shambles that is the proposed new hospital at Wynyard goes on with a new planning application, but with major fault lines of bed numbers, building costs, future interest rises,
noncompetitive tender negotiations over delays and a location whose main access from the A19 is a road that suffers severe delays daily.
On the demand side, growth in M2 appears to have been held down early in the year by the public's concerns about depository institutions; purchases of Treasury securities through
noncompetitive tenders were especially heavy in January.
Evidence of the rising opportunity cost of holding M2 can be seen in the unusually heavy volume of
noncompetitive tenders in Treasury bill and note auctions, which suggest a shift out of M2 balances.
Households responded to the relatively low returns on deposits by looking elsewhere, as suggested by heavy flows into stock and bond mutual funds and sizable
noncompetitive tenders at Treasury auctions.
Noncompetitive tenders for Treasury bills and notes, a rough indicator of the extent to which individual investors are increasing their holdings of Treasury securities, surged early in the year and remained strong through March.
Rates on Treasury bills moved up appreciably less, at a time when there was no overall growth in the size of the weekly auctions and the supply available for competitive awards was reduced by substantial retail demand through
noncompetitive tenders. In longer-term debt markets, yields generally were up about 1/3 to 1/2 percentage point, but yields on fixed-rate mortgages rose somewhat more.
