Australian Treasury official speaking – headline inflation slowing … but

Secretary to the Australian Treasury, Dr Steven Kennedy, is giving testimony in the Australian parliament, at the Senate Budget Estimates, Economics Legislation Committee.

You can view the live event here.

In brief:

• Interest rates will come down, but not to pre-pandemic levels
• household consumption is subdued
• households are rebuilding savings
• underlying inflation is useful for the direction of inflation, headline inflation has shown a “material” fall in cost of living pressures.
• a fall in cost of living pressure has been shown in headline inflation
• underlying inflation showing the direction of inflation
• says trade off between lower inflation and jobs

AUD not a lot changed on his testimony, he does not seem out of line with current RBA thinking.

Note his comments on headline vs. underlying inflation. Headline inflation in Australia, according to the most recent release, dipped under the top of the RBA target band (the band is 2 – 3%) while underlying (core) inflation (in this case the trimmed mean) stayed well above 3%.

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AUD/USD not doing much. Its really waiting for cues from the US election. We just had some exit polls. Pretty useless they were, IMHO:

• The first US exit poll is out: Women voted at a higher rate than in 2024
• Preliminary Exit poll results from Arizona from Edison Research. Higher Hispanic voters

This article was written by Eamonn Sheridan at www.forexlive.com.