Preview of the Reserve Bank of Australia monetary policy meeting on Tuesday 1 March
This is from Bill Evans, Chief Economist at Westpac.
He cuts straight to the TL;DR version ... cool:
- We are confident that the Board will decide to keep rates on hold
More, in very brief, bolding mine:
- The Governor has made it clear that the Bank will be most closely monitoring progress in the labour market and whether there is any evidence of the recent turmoil in financial markets impacting domestic demand in Australia.
- In that regard time will be required to get a clear read on those developments.
- We remain comfortable with our long held view that rates will remain on hold throughout 2016
- Evans does not expect the RBA to be too perturbed by the lift in the unemployment rate from 5.8% to 6.0% ... given the month to month volatility and that 'trend' unemployment rate estimates continue to track lower
- The path of the Australia dollar will also be a key input to the board's deliberations over the course of the next few months. In that regard the path of the US dollar and US monetary policy will be key factors.
- Clearly the key variables to watch are jobs growth; the unemployment rate; wage pressures and of course the path of the USD
