Q+A: The Week Ahead | 27 July 2026
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Fear and Greed Q&A, where we ask and answer questions about business, investing, economics, politics, and more. I'm Michael Thompson, and every Monday morning we are joined by economist Stephen Koukoulis to look at the week ahead. You'll find him at thekouk.com, T-H-E-K-O-U-K.com, and sharing his views on LinkedIn as well. Stephen, good morning. Top of the morning to you, Michael. Now, Stephen, after a couple of Pretty quiet weeks. We are well and truly back into it this week. A big, big week for the economy. We get both the monthly and quarterly inflation figures. We get building approvals and house prices. There's a speech from Michelle Bullock. But all of it, I suspect, revolves around inflation.
So we will start there. That is the big one. Both the monthly and quarterly inflation numbers come out together on the same day, within the same report. What does the quarterly data tell us that the monthly indicator doesn't?
Look, the move to a monthly inflation gauge, monthly inflation indicator, is a really good move because it gives you quite contemporary data uh for what's happening to some price pressures in the economy particularly when there's a turning point up or down in the rate of inflation so for example uh we're getting the june quarter data later this week we've already got the april and may data so we've got a pretty good building block for what that june quarter result will be however what the benefit of the June quarter data is, and this is why the RBA still prefers quite clearly getting the quarterly numbers, it overcomes some of that volatility in some of the key components. And an obvious one in recent months has been petrol, which has been up to $2.50, down to $1.70, back up to $2.
So if you're adjusting inflation measures on the back of just petrol prices, you're getting a really big contribution or a subtraction from inflation from just the move in petrol. So the quarterly numbers sort of smooth it out a little bit and you get a bit more of a decent read of the underlying or the trimmed mean rate of inflation using the quarterly numbers. That doesn't say the monthly numbers are bad because they do contain information on building costs, on food and insurance and a lot of these other indicators in the first two months of each quarter. But the quarterly data, they're the ones that are going to take the attention this week.
So what is it going to be? If we've already got the first kind of two-thirds, we've got an indication of what's the first two-thirds of the quarter, what are we expecting to see on Wednesday morning?
Well, for the headline figure, which includes everything in the CPI basket, probably a quarterly result around about 1%. For an annual figure around about 4.3%. So well above the RBA's target of 2.5%. But that, speaking of petrol, that does include some of the petrol price increases, which really kicked off in the month of April. They said they came off a little bit, but not that much. For the trimmed mean, the underlying inflation rate, again, a number that's too high for the RBA's liking, probably something around 0.9 for the quarter, 3.7 annual. And that's going to be causing the markets and the reserve banks some angst because it's that underlying inflation rate that really needs to start tilting lower towards 3, 2.75, and eventually 2.5 before we can be confident that we've sort of beaten this inflation bug.
Thank you.
Look, I'll tie in here the employment numbers that we had last week because I think 76,000 jobs were created in June, well above the expectations of 15,000. But a lot of those that were created were part-time roles. There were more people entering the labour market and not all of them were successful in actually finding work. So we saw the unemployment rate hold at 4.4%. But the jobs market is very strong. Does that, combined with perhaps an uncomfortable inflation number, like the ones that you're mentioning that are still well above the target band for the RBA, is it going to make a rate hike more likely in the near future?
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:06–5:33
2
How will June CPI monthly and quarterly releases shape RBA decisions?
5:33–6:35
3
Why does the quarterly CPI smooth volatility compared with the monthly gauge?
6:35–14:07
4
What do current forecasts predict for June quarter headline and trimmed mean inflation?
14:07–15:34