Empower Blog Consumer Sentiment

RBA Rate Decision – August 2017

Today Governor Lowe and the Reserve Board met and—no surprises here — cash rate remains on hold at 1.5%. We did see some interesting commentary come out of the RBA over the July period, and some of that commentary was around what they thought was an ideal cash rate — around 3.25%. Now, with the current cash rate sitting at 1.5%, the market...

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RBA Rate Decision – July 2017

FACT SHEET: Changes on Government Fees and First Home Initiatives (Effective since 1 July 2017) [gravityform id="23" title="false" description="false"]   Today the Reserved Governor and the Board met and they've kept the cash rate on hold at 1.5% for the start of the new financial year. Let's have a look at some of the economic data tha...

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RBA Rate Decision – June 2017

The Reserve Board met today, and they kept the cash rate on hold for another month at 1.5%. Now we saw May 2017 being a very interesting month in regards to the Federal Budget. It came out, and we did see some surprises inside that Federal Budget. Firstly let's talk about the Bank Levy. This is all to do with what they call budget repair and it'...

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What Causes Property Price To Fall?

In this How To Session, we're going to get a little bit more serious, and we're going to talk about what causes property prices to fall. Now property prices are again, similar to any type of economic value setting mechanism where demand and supply plays a role. So when you get low supply and high demand, you usually see values increase. It's not di...

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RBA Rate Decision – November 2015

On this Melbourne Cup Tuesday, the RBA Board met and they've kept interest rates on hold for another month. Now, they has been a lot that have happened in the last month and I'm going to spend a few minutes talking about that. The first thing we saw is an out-of-cycle rate rise for mortgage holders, most importantly, not business lending. Just m...

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RBA Rate Decision – October 2015

Today the Reserve Governor Board met and kept interest rates on hold as widely expected. However, they has been some interesting economic events that has occurred over the last month. Let's look at those in details. The first one I want to look at is the market volatility. There is a lot of share market volatility and globally speaking, there a...

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RBA Rate Decision – September 2015

Hello Ben Kingsley here. Thanks for watching this RBA video announcement. As you can obviously pick up, I'm not in the office as I usually am at the moment. I'm currently on a family holiday up in tropical North Queensland. What an interesting time to take a holiday. In fact the last time, as I was saying it to my wife, that I took a holiday lik...

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RBA Rate Decision – June 2015

Hello, today the Governor and the Reserve Board met and they've kept interest rates on hold. Now this was widely anticipated. The facts are, at 2% cash rate, it is at historically low level and if we were to actually move rates further down which we do have capacity to do if you look at the minutes for May 2015 Cash Rate. They are saying that we...

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RBA Rate Decision – May 2015

Today the Reserve Governor and the Board met and they've dropped interest rate once again to 2%. So following the February rate cut, they've followed it up with a May rate cut. Now the reason behind that is simply the spare capacity that we are still seeing in the economy. They've made a judgement call, even before we see the May 2015 budget ...

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RBA Rate Decision – April 2015

Today the Reserve Governor and the Board met and they've kept interest rates on hold for the April 2015 board meeting. That has kept the cash rate at 2.25%. Now, why had they kept the rate on hold? Well the reasons come down to a few things. To begin with, they've probably seen some early signs on the economy starting to pick up. Those early ...

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RBA Rate Decision – March 2015

Today the Reserve Bank of Australia decides to keep rates on hold after dropping rates by 25 basis points last month. Now looking at the Board Meeting minutes from last month, it was a bit of a flip of the coin whether they were going to drop rates in February or potentially wait until March. Ultimately, we all know the outcome of that. They d...

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RBA Rate Decision – February 2015 – Why did they drop 25 basis points?

So why did the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) moved on interest rates this month when most commentators including myself actually thought it would stay at the 2.5% cash rate. The 25 basis points reduction to 2.25%- what's behind that? Well, the story is around our currency and we really need to get our currency lower. I think you'll find the RB...

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RBA Rate Decision – December 2014

Today the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) Board meets and kept interest rates on hold at 2.5%. The cash rate is now been at 2.5% since August 2013 and the Reserve Bank board won't actually meet until next February so we're going to see this low monetary policy position for the extended period. Inside the minutes of the last meeting, it was also ver...

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