Podcast Appearances
That's a few of the measures.
And Reserve Bank has their own ones, which I'm not necessarily familiar with, but they must do a whole bunch of stuff behind the scenes to
add certain things in and take other things out and so i guess yeah where am i left it you know strikes me that you could put in whatever you want and take out whatever you want as well and you know it's the whole thing if you know my cricket batting average if i took out all my ducks i'd be you know don bradman or so you know i think there's a limit to what you want to do here i mean you know it
you can fiddle statistics any way you want um but so so i think there's a balance you know you probably want to ignore some one-offs but you don't necessarily want to ignore them all the time and let's face it we've still got headline overall cpi inflation 3.1 so and that's above the reserve bank's target and they're not they're not tasked with um keeping some measure of core inflation within target over the medium term it's headline cpi inflation and at the moment is above target so um
Yeah, there's lots of things to weigh up.
And I mean, I've already said the legs, you know, let's not panic about one number above target for now, because it's been a deep recession.
There's still capacity in the economy.
You know, inflation should come down.
So, yeah, I'm sort of there's lots to weigh up.
I mean, for me, I still I'm always a wee bit cautious of taking out the stuff that's inconvenient, you know, and focusing too much on
on whatever measure of core inflation you have.
I think in the end, 3.1% is above target.
That's what people see.
That's what people understand to some extent.
They're still sort of concerned about that cost of living, not only the level of prices, but also the growth rate.
So yeah, I just think, what does it amount to?
Probably that you have to, don't panic, but also don't ignore the possibility that inflation stays a bit higher for longer.
you know those official cash rate increases that people were talking about sort of early 2027 potentially they get brought forward now there's a lot of water to go under the bridge you know there's capacity okay the economy's turning around but it's been a been a pretty prolonged recession so even if some indicators are picking up in growth terms they're still starting from a low level in terms of the the activity
So yeah, I wouldn't necessarily panic, but you do have to acknowledge the risk that OCR increases do get brought forward into this year rather than next year, which will have implications for mortgage rates and all sorts of things.