Why the Reserve Bank thinks it’s too soon to cut rates

When the Reserve Bank’s second-in-command – recently appointed deputy governor Andrew Hauser – took shots at his closest observers this week, he ruffled plenty of feathers.

“It’s a world of winners and losers, gurus and charlatans, geniuses and buffoons,” he proclaimed. Then he wagged a finger at those confidently commentating from the sidelines on the direction of the economy. “It’s a dangerous game,” he warned.

RBA governor Michele Bullock said people’s expectations for rate cuts in the next six months didn’t align with the board’s feeling.Credit: Dominic Lorrimer

We know economists – including those at the Reserve Bank – are notoriously bad at knowing exactly what we (and therefore the economy) will do. So, why was Hauser so mad at those confidently making their own calls?

Brash statements made by the media, government and economists have real-world consequences. People often rely on that information to make decisions, from taking out mortgages to negotiating wages.

“What about Phil Lowe?” you may ask. Didn’t the former RBA governor promise in 2021 that interest rates would not go up until 2024? Well, sort of. It was actually couched in caveats which many people glossed over.

The Reserve Bank generally treads carefully because the words of its bosses can shift behaviour: a hidden weapon beyond its interest rate-setting superpower.

RBA governor Michele Bullock often declares she is “not providing forward guidance” when fielding questions from journalists trying to get a steer on interest rates. But last week, she gave the closest thing to guidance in a while: people’s expectation for rate cuts in the next six months doesn’t align with the RBA board’s feeling, she said. At least, “not at the moment.”

In doing so, Bullock flexed the bank’s hidden bicep. She signalled for all of us to rein in our expectations of a rate cut and, she would have hoped, our inflation expectations.

This is important because what people believe can become reality. If we expect inflation to stay high, this belief can feed into the wages we ask for, and the prices businesses charge.

That’s not to say the Reserve Bank doesn’t believe its own thinking. The only medicine it can explicitly prescribe is the level of interest rates, but the central bank busies itself with a lot of data gathering, discussions and number crunching to diagnose the state of the economy.

So, why does it think the next six months is too early for a rate cut?

Core to the Reserve’s thinking is its observation that, collectively, we are consuming more than we can produce for an extended period of time. Sure, young people and mortgage holders have been tightening their belts as housing costs surge. But that’s been more than offset by older, affluent Australians splurging on things such as travel, by population growth and by government spending.

Now, the government has bones to pick with any suggestion that its spending is contributing to inflation. And Government Services Minister Bill Shorten this week trashed RBA chief economist Sarah Hunter’s assessment that the economy is “running a little bit too hot”.

However, it is important to note Hunter’s view isn’t necessarily that Australians are doing too well, or that the economy is bubbling along. It’s more a reflection of the limited spare capacity we have to cater for the spending – however little or much of it we may be doing.

We’re spending “too much” mostly by comparison to the limited resources we have to keep up with it: the people making our coffee in the morning and machines they use to brew it for us, for example.

Unless we become more productive, making more with the things we already have, the more we strain people and machines to meet our demands, and the pricier things will be to produce.

Productivity is especially difficult to improve for sectors such as hospitality, which rely heavily on people rather than machines (there’s only so many ways your barista can brew a coffee faster and better). And it’s why services inflation is proving so much more stubborn than goods inflation.

How does the Reserve Bank know how much spare capacity we have (and therefore how much pressure we might expect on prices)? It looks at something called the output gap: the difference between how much we’re producing and how much we could produce without putting too much pressure on prices.

Heaven for the Reserve Bank would be an output gap of zero. Any lower means we’re not using our resources as intensively as we could – including people who want to work, but can’t find jobs, or machines sitting idle.

Any higher, and we’re using our resources too intensively. This can be OK for a short period, but as workers demand higher wages, machines are run into the ground and businesses compete for a shrinking pool of resources, prices rise. For the past few years, this is the state the Reserve Bank thinks our economy has been in.

Measuring the output gap is tricky. We can’t really see it, and our capacity can change over time as our population changes, or we find better ways to do things. So, how does the RBA measure it?

How much the economy is producing is measured through statistics such as Gross Domestic Product. The trickier task is pinning down how much the economy could produce without adding to inflation. To do this, the Reserve Bank uses economic models which spit out results based on things such as what’s happened in the past and the data plugged into them: relatively straightforward numbers such as population, as well as educated assumptions about other factors influencing the economy.

The bank also asks businesses about their capacity usage through surveys and by chatting with them through its liaison program. Then, there’s also the inflation figure itself.

While the output gap is just one gauge, it is given considerable weight in the Reserve Bank’s decisions. So far, the gap is narrowing, the bank says, but it’s likely we’re still pushing our resources past the ideal level to pull inflation back into line.

There’s not much the central bank can do to increase potential output, or capacity, in the economy, which is why it is instead focusing on weakening our demand, or spending.

While a rate cut now would be like an iron infusion for an anaemic economy, help preserve jobs, and bring mortgage holders relief, the bank is clearly on the warpath against its public enemy number one: inflation.

Keep in mind, though, no one is perfect. The Reserve Bank is careful to stress that the output gap, like most of its other measures, is “subject to considerable uncertainty.”

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