Stephen Koukoulas
speaker
2,355 appearances
24 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 20 Sep
Stephen Koukoulas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 24 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 6.
Appearances
Probably, it was only about two years ago.
And I was optimistic.
So my one out of a couple of thousand people who they survey didn't tilt the balance towards optimism, I'm afraid.
It's a sobering analysis indeed.
And the worst thing, not the worst, a bad thing about an economy could be if you do get sluggish growth, but inflation doesn't fall.
Us economists, the dismal scientists, if you like, will tolerate weak growth if it leads to lower inflation.
You'll sort of say that's the medicine the economy needs, but it's not great when the economy weakens and we have a higher unemployment rate.
But if there's a trade-off and we get lower inflation, we might have to take that.
But when you don't get that inflation rate falling back to target, you think, well, what are we having a weak economy for?
And that's the sort of dilemma.
I think Andrew Howser, the deputy RBA governor, sort of mentioned this in times gone by in recent speeches that their worst nightmare is that the economy slows down, but inflation doesn't fall.
So Deloitte sort of
packaged that quite nicely in their report and sort of said that in a sense it wasn't that far away from what the RBA is thinking if you go look at the RBA forecast table and compare it to Deloitte's I think Deloitte's have a higher inflation rate for a little bit longer and that's fine but the growth numbers the unemployment numbers are not that dissimilar and this is what we're still we or many of us are trying to get our minds around that is the next year going to have this sort of
news on economic growth that you think, oh, gosh, that's disappointing.
Unemployment going up, oh, isn't that bad?
And then inflation isn't coming down much.
So that's what I think the picture is from Deloitte's and indeed from some other economists too.
And I think that that's a genuine risk.
We really want to see this inflation rate come down if we're to have this really sluggish growth outlook.
Yes, I'm not aware of too many forecasters, if any, that have a two point something on GDP over the next 12 to 24 months.
Showing 1141–1160 of 2,355 · page 58 of 118
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