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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 24 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 6.
Appearances
So,
Not quite that hard landing or, dare I say, recession that some are talking about because even though the household sector, us consumers, are sort of hunkering down and paring back our spending growth, we do know from the business investment side of the economy, the CapEx and data centres, educational facilities, warehouses, these sorts of industries,
Infrastructure, which adds to productivity, by the way, that's actually very buoyant.
So while the bottom line economic growth will slow, the composition of that growth will be quite different when we sort of look back in a year's time about how the economy performed.
Short term forecasting is hard, Michael, when it comes to rates.
I've still got a few bruises and scratches from the last financial year on the RBA.
Yeah.
I think the – can I do it in two halves?
The short-term answer, if there is a move in interest rates in the next little while, it will be up, not down.
But that doesn't mean there is going to be a move in interest rates up.
Because the Reserve Bankers, they've made reasonably clear in their minutes of recent board meetings and conversations that both the Governor and Deputy Governor have had,
um they're they're noticing like we are the softening in the labor market the softening in economic growth and just by the by the current sort of deceleration in the oil price and other commodity prices by the way one of the reasons why we had that inflation spike in the first half of this calendar year uh and now back to roughly where they were pre pre-us iran conflict so
To the extent that that filters through into lower operational costs for many businesses, that some of the supply chain problems might not be quite as acute through the course of this year, with inflation set to come down, the Reserve Bank will be on hold and...
If I had to put my 50 cents on it, I'd say that the next move is going to be down.
Whether it sort of falls into this current financial year, I'm not sure.
But I think the odds are sort of slowly moving towards rates going down, not up as the next move.
Yeah, and the RBA has a history of that.
It's interesting when we look back at sort of monetary policy cycles, and it's sort of funny when you have a cycle and there are 18-month periods where interest rates are unchanged because the Reserve Bank, like all mere mortals, they're looking at the often conflicting news on the economy.
You know, the good old, on the one hand, we should hike, on the other hand, we should cut.
So what do we do?
Showing 1181–1200 of 2,355 · page 60 of 118
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