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Market Musing, Asia Pacific

18 Feb 2025

RBA: Gradual ‘relief’ cycle kicks off

After delivering a string of rate hikes over 2022/23 and holding steady since November 2023 as it battled against inflation the RBA announced a bit of interest rate ‘relief’ at today’s meeting. The RBA cut the official cash rate by 25bps, lowering it to 4.1%. This was largely expected with it being ~90% priced in before the meeting, and with 30 of 34 economists surveyed forecasting it. The move will provide some income support for indebted mortgage holders and interest rate sensitive businesses. But it isn’t a large jolt. On our figuring, a 0.25% reduction lowers the monthly repayment on...

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10 Dec 2024

RBA: Moving closer to rate cuts

As widely anticipated the RBA held interest rates steady at 4.35% once again at today’s meeting, the final one for 2024. This is where policy has been since November 2023. However, some adjustments to the RBA’s guidance do suggest the door to interest rate relief starting to be delivered in H1 2025 has opened a bit further. Prior rhetoric that the Board “is not ruling anything in or out” has been jettisoned, as was the comment that policy “will need to be sufficiently restrictive” until there is confidence inflation is heading sustainably towards target. Instead, the RBA notes that while...

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04 Dec 2024

AUD: Temporary GDP hammer blow?

The now dated Q3 Australian GDP has exerted downward pressure on the AUD (now ~$0.6415) with the already sluggish underlying growth picture undershooting analysts forecasts. This won’t surprise businesses at the coalface, particularly those in goods-producing and interest rate sensitive industries, with the GDP figures once again showing that higher mortgage rates and elevated prices are constraining private sector activity. The Australian economy expanded by 0.3% in Q3. As a result, annual growth decelerated to just 0.8%pa. Outside of the COVID lockdowns this is the slowest annual pace since the early-90’s recession. The detail in the national accounts can be...

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26 Nov 2024

AUD/NZD: RBNZ stuck in reverse

In its final meeting of 2024 the RBNZ delivered another outsized rate cut with today’s 50bp reduction lowering the Official Cash Rate to 4.25%. Interest rates had peaked at 5.50% in NZ, but since turning course in August the RBNZ has delivered 125bps worth of easing in quick time as it looks to move settings out of the very ‘restrictive’ territory they were in. As a result, the RBNZ’s OCR is now below the RBA’s cash rate (now 4.35%) for the first time since mid-2013. And the gap should continue to widen, in our view, with the RBNZ set to...

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07 Nov 2024

Trump 2.0 & the AUD

The decisive victory by former President Trump in the 2024 US election and elevated odds the Republicans also sweep Congress has generated bursts of market volatility over the past few sessions. This might be a taste of things to come. The election result shouldn’t be viewed as a ‘shock’ as it was 8 years ago. The outcome was in line with the signal various opinion polls and probability gauges had been pointing to for several weeks. Nevertheless, as we had forewarned in our prior research, a Trump win (particularly if it was compounded by Republican victories in both chambers of...

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