Daniel Ziffer

For watchers of the Australian economy, it's off to the races with important data and decisions on the horizon.

Wednesday's inflation data will provide crucial information for the RBA's interest rate decision.

And in the United States, five of the so-called magnificent seven tech companies are set to release their results this week as global economic questions about AI's valuation lingers.

Welcome to ABC Business Daily.

Dan, there is a lot on the economic plate this week, including the crucial inflation data.

Now, this gives us an idea of how much we think prices are increasing in the Australian economy.

Now, people know that they're feeling that things are going up, particularly when they

go to the petrol bowser, even if we have seen a kind of trending down of the price of unleaded in recent weeks.

But this data is crucial, isn't it?

Because it's the first time we get robust data about how the war in the Middle East has impacted prices here in Australia.

There's a few major things I think people are looking for.

And you're right to point out that the last data we received was before the original strikes occurred.

on Iran that started this conflict and obviously we saw retaliatory strikes after that and we've seen such a dislocation of global energy markets.

But we also know the Australian inflation rate was too high for the Reserve Bank even before we saw this intense supply shock of global energy.

It was already

way higher than the Reserve Bank wanted it to be, which is why we had already seen an interest rate hike at the start of this year.

Now, the betting is, and the timing of this particular data release is really crucial because it comes ahead of the Reserve Bank making another decision about what to do with interest rates.

The betting clearly from the money markets is that there's a 75% chance that the Reserve Bank will hike interest rates again.

That would bring the cash rate up

to 4.35%.