The country’s economic outlook makes for grim reading – with two major exceptions
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Financial markets and economists were of one mind that the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) would this week announce yet another rate hike, its fifth in this cycle, and they did. But it’s probably worth focusing on the fact that three of the nine monetary board members voted to keep rates on hold.
To be clear, it’s likely the dissenters agreed that inflation remains too high at present: it clearly is. Underlying inflation, the best indicator of price pressures, has been outside the RBA’s target band (of 2% to 3%) for almost all of the past four years. The dissenters may well have been equally uncomfortable with the increase in inflationary expectations, which jumped up to 5.3% in October.