Empower Blog Trade Wars

RBA Cash Rate – February 2020

On this first Tuesday of February as part of the new 2020s, the new decade, the RBA had a tough decision to make today. They had some really positive economic data flowing through from the end of 2019 that consisted of a really good unemployment story. It also said that retail spending had at a bounce in November, so that was positive. Ultimatel...

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RBA Cash Rate – December 2019

Today Governor Lowe and the reserve board met for the final time in 2019 and they kept the cash rate on hold at 0.75%. Now, in 2019 we saw three rate cuts. And for all of those people who love the data, what's interesting about that is between August 2016 and May 2019 — 34 months — the cash rate was on a hold at 1.5%. So they've definitely tri...

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RBA Cash Rate – November 2019

On this Melbourne Cup Tuesday in November, the Reserve Board met and they've kept the cash rate on hold at 0.75% — and that's on the back of stable unemployment. So we haven't seen unemployment deteriorate — in fact, it improved — but more about that later. And we’ve also had some commentary coming out of the Reserve Bank, in regards to ...

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RBA Cash Rate October 2019: Third Time Lucky?

Today Governor Lowe and the Reserve Board met for the first Tuesday of October and they've cut the cash rate.   Now, 75% of economists believed that this was going to be the case.  If you were listening to some of the commentary last week from Governor Phillip Lowe around his concerns in the market, it was pretty clear that he was signall...

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RBA Cash Rate September 2019

G'day and welcome to September and on the first Tuesday of this month Governor Lowe and the RBA Board met and they kept the cash rate on hold at 1%. Now, some punters might have been thinking, “Well are we going another 25% lower?”, but really most economist believe that's going to be next month. So I suspect the board decided not to spook t...

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RBA Cash Rate August 2019: Is it Time to FIX Your Rate?

Today Governor Lowe and the Reserve Board met and they kept the cash rate on hold at 1%. Now that's obviously on the back off two rate cuts that we sold in June and July, which took the cash rate down to 1%. So the consensus is that we needed to see some time to see what impact those two particular rate cuts have had in terms of confidence, sentime...

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RBA Cash Rate Decision – November 2018

On this Melbourne Cup Tuesday, Reserve Governor Lowe and the board met and they've kept the cash rate on hold for another month. Really, what we're seeing here is no new stories — inflation is just non-existent. The September CPI data came in at 0.4% increase, which took the annual rate to 2%. Now, the market was expecting a 0.5% increase so w...

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RBA Cash Rate Decision – October 2018

On this first Tuesday in October, the RBA Board met and, really, the challenge was, “What could they do?” They did very little — probably sipped a bit of tea because there's nothing more for them to do with the cash rate. And this may be the case for several years to come. Now, why is that? Especially considering that the GDP numbers in Ju...

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