Bernard Hickey
speaker
288 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jul 2026
last heard 12 Jul
Bernard Hickey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
In fact, they may be talking about rate cuts.
So that's what I marry up my spreadsheets.
And then I go looking for the language.
around how they see inflation, what their concerns are about the economy, whether they think the official cash rate is above neutral or below neutral.
Yeah, well, it's a very vague idea.
It's not like an actual speedometer on your car where you can see we're travelling at 79 kilometres an hour or whatever.
Or on cruise control.
The Reserve Bank estimates that it's somewhere between 2.5% and 3.5%.
So around 3% is where they see the neutral rate at the moment.
That's right.
It really is a measure of whether they're going to stamp on the brakes or push on the accelerator.
Now, a lot of economists, and you could argue the reserve banks, say that anything below 3% is where they've still got their foot on the accelerator.
And they would argue that this rate hike that we saw last week from 2.25 to 2.5 isn't so much stomping on the brake as just taking their foot off the accelerator.
You know, you can have some really fun debates about where neutral is and also this idea about the amount of slack there is in the economy.
You know, if you think of slack in the economy, it's a bit like your accelerator.
You know, do you have the accelerator hard to the floor?
Is the car on the red line or is it just idling?
And when the car is, you know, redlining it, it could burst a gasket here and there.
You'd probably get your foot hard on the accelerator.
You take your foot off and then maybe you put your foot on the brake.
Showing 241–260 of 288 · page 13 of 15
← Previous
Next →