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
The rate of economic growth is cooling a little bit.
We're seeing that with the unemployment rate creeping up, month-to-month volatility.
We've heard that argument for decades.
The month-to-month numbers are all over the place.
But if you put the trend line through, unemployment is going up.
The household savings numbers are so hard to read now because they're being driven by a couple of things at the moment.
One is that we're filling up our petrol tanks whenever we get the chance, and particularly while the petrol price is low, which it is right now, and before the excise reduction is phased out in coming months.
And there was a little bit of a quirk with...
travel uh spending because of the rebates or what do you call i can't remember what these tickets are called when they were sort of like uh turned into travel credits during covid they're about to end so people book holidays and that's counted the spending numbers oh so where are we
Slower economy.
Inflation is still too high.
That's the other thing.
We know that from the underlying or the trimmed mean rate still being around about three and a half percent, up and down one or two tenths from that level.
And yeah, it's one of those ones where something for everybody, but there's no definitive and sort of absolute slam dunk on where the economy is going and where interest rates are going.
Yeah, look, Andrew Houser, the Deputy Governor of the Reserve Bank, gave a bit of a fireside chat, I think it was, and he mentioned that sort of some of the things that I've been saying, so I don't know whether he's following me or I'm following him, probably the latter, but he said that we've done a lot, the three rate hikes, from an already relatively high starting point, so Australian cash rate at 4.35% is significantly higher than New Zealand, Canada, a lot of these other comparable economies.
So we've actually done a lot of the preemptive rate hikes and the other countries haven't really started yet.
But he did say that we need to do that to keep inflation down.
Look, if they were meeting this week, they'd probably sort of say, no, look, we've got a bias to hike, but we're not going to pull the trigger.
Look, that's a really good question.
We tend not to get prices falling when business input costs go down, like the oil is the obvious issue right now.
Showing 1261–1280 of 2,355 · page 64 of 118
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