Dated Brent Oil hits record $144 a barrell

0:00Right, it is time to talk business thanks to our partner's 4-slath bar. Community prices have lifted. We spoke about this this morning as the Middle East conflict plays out, but is that now reaching a turning point? Garth Bray is with us from Heald now. Business, Garth, good morning. Good morning, right. So we'll start. We'll do a quick little look at oil and then get to the Global Dairy Trade overnight oil. Data to Brent, our new friend, which is the price of oil on the water with a date for delivery and so on, had a record 144 bucks about 44.42 or 46 depending on two different numbers of seen, but that's the highest it's ever been really. And that's a head of the futures price, which I think is still holding steady about 109-ish and and trading about five or six bucks premium on that for your West Texas. Because as you explained yesterday, the differentiation in times, backwardation, as they say, the more you need to get a hold of stuff, the more you prepare to pay a slightly higher price for that. And that West Texas crude price is slightly ahead in the market. A bit in the hand, there's no really. Yeah, it's a little bit better now than later. So that's ahead, but the

1:00Global Dairy Trade stuff was interesting. Yes. We've had our first step backward there in a wee while. Probably had been expected to some extent, but you can see the last sort of four or five trading sessions that's been well up, dropped about 3.4%. Whole milk powder only down 0.7. Talking to Stu Davison from High Ground Dairy, who's a great analyst, Kiwi Analyst, who's based out of the States normally, he was saying, look, the Chinese buyers basically took a bit of a step back in this trading session. They're still the majority of buyers and the majority of our trade and New Zealand still well placed, obviously, physically to keep trading there. But they've basically done their restocking after the Lunar New Year, just backed off a wee bit. There's still a heap of production out there. But some interesting and good tantalising signs of maybe a $9.49-$50ish kind of forecast for the 2027 season, which will actually get official numbers on kind of where that range is like to be in about a month. I mean, if that's the case, that's sort of three seasons you've had with close to 10 bucks. Okay, KGFM, which is not to be scoffed at, Garth? Well, not to be scoffed at. No, yeah, we'll take that.

2:01We'll take that. Now let's talk about the AI, the money that's been public agency spending money on AI and whether it's waste or not. Right, so this is an investigation that businesses have been doing. Obviously, AI pretty topical. We were chatting about this yesterday. They asked government agencies, tell us what you've been spending back to 2023 January when sort of chat GPT really and those GPT models came online. Came up with about a $20 million figure across a bunch of different agencies, probably not the true figure, because a lot of this is buried in the pricing that different agencies do. A lot of it's Microsoft, a lot of it's co-pilot. Police are big spenders, about eight million bucks. They've put into various systems there and they're saying, I'll look at spending and sub-save to some million dollars, probably save to 18,000 hours worth of so on and time processing files. ACC, IRD, doing it quite big time. But the concern that this piece today points out is that there's no real standard measure for productivity. Is it just sailing a bit of time? Is the time saved just creating slot for people further down the line? There's no standard measure. You've got 17 different agencies all doing their own thing,

3:02basically working out which thing might work for them. Rather than maybe a coordinated response or some people saying, this could really work quite well. So, hard to judge really if it's 20 million bucks well spent so far. Yeah, absolutely. And as you well know, we're getting in OCR update today from the Reserve Bank, aren't we? It'll be quite a big surprise if there's any change in the numbers there. And I guess it'll just be about that well-signal mid-term, medium-term risk. But Annabelle is talking about this, which is unusual. It's the first time we've had a press conference off the back of a statement, really, where there's no monetary policy statement. The big sort of quarterly, big picture lock. So long live transparency. Thank you. Thank you very much. Harold, now business host, Garth Bray, and we talk business every day. Thanks to our partner's full-site bar.