Who’d want to be Reserve Bank Governor Michele Bullock? On Tuesday she had to do the almost impossible: defend a decision not to cut interest rates at a time when they were being cut in just about every other major industrial nation.
On Thursday the US Federal Reserve joined the Bank of England, the Bank of Canada, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand and central banks in China, Sweden and the European Union in what its officials expect to be a series of cuts, kicking off with a double-header: a cut of 0.50 percentage points instead of the usual 0.25.
In her press conference after Tuesday’s board meeting Governor Bullock said disinflation was “further advanced” in those countries than it was in Australia.
