Podcast Appearances
you know, I tend to lean more towards the side of sort of being cautious about the economy, and that should sort of keep some sort of level of reassurance at the Reserve Bank in terms of how much they really need to react with higher interest rates.
But they've only got one target, and that is the inflation rate.
And so, you know, almost whatever the economy's doing, they've got the target of inflation.
And if inflation's going up, it gets...
Gets a wee bit awkward.
So I'm conscious of that sort of trade off as well.
And that conflict there between weighing up the balance of higher inflation versus the weakening economy.
So, yeah, that's what the people have to weigh up, I guess, when they make these decisions.
But for me, in the back of my mind, I just think this this this can't be good for the economy.
Yes, there's inflation impact in the near term, maybe the medium term.
But ultimately, this is a negative story for the economy.
So that should eventually bring inflation back down.
And, you know, the thing, I guess, that's been maybe missing, if you want to put it that way, on the housing market has probably been a confidence factor, a sort of job security factor.
Maybe that's starting to come back.
But then, boom, along comes this Iran thing.
And that confidence factor is surely going to go missing again.
So, yeah, and that's going to be across the property market and the economy too.
So I think that's probably the thing in my mind mostly.
But...
definitely going to have an inflation impact and if it feeds through to those second round effects and it feeds through to inflation expectations then yeah the reserve bank will we'll definitely have to do something at that point so we're maybe not there yet but um yeah there's a lot to watch