Under the spectacularly misleading title RBA’s ‘neutral’ stance wipes out big four hike calls for 2019, the AFR today serves up a bitter message from the pulpit for Australia’s big bank economists:
Westpac, NAB, ANZ and now Commonwealth Bank are now unified in their expectation that there will not be an interest rate hike in 2019.
The only problem is not all four had rate hike forecasts. Bill Evans at Westpac, who was not interviewed, has been calling no hikes for years so he has been proven right as the other’s have been proven wrong. Credit where it is due. That said, it is only a short time now before Bill Evans is also proven wrong as the RBA folds to rate cuts.
At that point the AFR will rightly be able to claim that all economists (except MB and Gerard Minack) got it wrong by seeing rate hikes at all in this cycle.
