Carrington Clarke

And so that's why they're trying to

to deal with it while not running the economy into a recession.

Again, the question was asked of Michelle Bullock, is that basically a cost you're willing to wear?

And she kind of skirted around it.

She said, that's not our intention, but we need to, and she said, other...

Central banks around the world have done that.

They've hiked rates so quickly that- New Zealand, are you listening?

Right, exactly.

But she's saying that's not what we're trying to do here.

We're trying to adjust more incrementally so that we can hopefully have a situation where unemployment isn't rising too quickly, but inflation is coming under control.

But that is difficult.

And one of the things I thought was interesting, Lucy Ellis, who's the chief economist at Westpac, she's a former-

Reserve Bank Assistant Governor.

She said, at the moment, the Reserve Bank has a pretty pessimistic view of the Australian economy.

They really don't think the economy can be growing at much more than 2% without hitting constraints, which cause inflation to rise.

The last GDP numbers indicate that we're running slightly above that.

And so that's one of the concerns.

It's slowed down substantially.

Absolutely.

One of the things I thought she said that was interesting is that we have seen an impact in confidence, not just because of the rate hikes, but also what's happening globally.