Ian Verrender

I mean, all of the threats seem to have come to naught.

The ultimatums have been extended.

There's no credibility really left in America's argument here.

So I'm not sure how they get out of this with any kind of credibility intact.

And this is what the assumptions, the underlying assumptions are really based upon, that this is all going to come to an end.

Now, I guess if you want to take something positive out of the meeting yesterday and out of the press conference that Michelle Bullock gave, it was that she said, we've done three rate hikes in succession.

There's now time to be able to sit back and see what's going on.

She also suggested, however, which is bad news, is that the three rate hikes have merely been put in place to arrest the inflationary pressures that existed before the war with Iran broke out.

And so that kind of suggests that we're going to see more.

I mean, given those assumptions, though, if you look at the numbers and look at their forecasts, it's not a pretty picture.

It's higher inflation, higher unemployment, lower growth.

I mean, it's just a question of how bad it gets, really.

I mean, and the worst case scenario, of course, you've got growth at 0.5%.

That's really not growth at all.

And you've got unemployment at 5%.

So that is a major shift in the dynamics of the economy at the moment.

You know, if you've got 0.5%, that would indicate that you're probably in recession.

Okay.

Well, essentially the Reserve Bank, there's a whole range of different interest rate mechanisms within the market.

And one of them is the level at which banks borrow between themselves overnight and from the Reserve Bank for cash to keep themselves afloat.