Carrington Clarke

Yeah, that's exactly right.

So they're assuming that we will have at least two further interest rate hikes, including the one that's happened today.

And they said in this document going into this meeting, the market was assuming a 70% chance that there would be a rate hike.

This is, again, information that the board knew when they went in.

But they have downgraded the outlook for growth over the coming months.

And a very small increase in the unemployment rate as well, right?

And so part of how they've characterized the state of the economy was, yes, inflation was too high coming into this war.

That's why we saw the first rate hike this year.

This is the third before we even had the conflict and that setting off the recession.

of global energy supply and the price increasing.

But the labour market was in pretty good condition.

In fact, they thought it was too tight, right?

But what this has done, having this supply interruption of oil and what that means for the global economy, is that we're seeing further pressure on inflation

And then you're also seeing domestic growth go down.

And so the big external factor, which is well outside the control of the Reserve Bank, well outside Australia generally, is how long the Stratiform was, this critical waterway through which in normal times about 20% of the world's supply of oil, of natural gas passes through a huge amount,

of the fertilizer that is so critical to Australia's agricultural industry, et cetera, how quickly that reopens.

And what they've done is basically used, again, what the market is assuming, looking at the futures price for oil, Brent crude, the international benchmark, using that as kind of a gauge of how quickly those people who are purchasing oil think it's going to be restored to relatively normal.

When you look at that, and this is something we already kind of knew going into this meeting, well, we didn't know if you were looking at the right documents, that, in fact, they do expect it will be opened very quickly.

Now, that has been the case, I should point out, for basically the entire duration of this war, which originally Donald Trump was suggesting would be four weeks.

We're now two months in.