Australia’s third-quarter inflation report came in “pretty much where we thought,” Reserve Bank Governor Michele Bullock said Thursday, sending the currency sliding.
Bullock said the figures released on Wednesday were higher than the RBA’s August forecasts, but based on information since then, including the monthly CPI indicator, “we thought it was going to be about where it came out.”
Bullock was speaking during testimony to a parliamentary panel in her first remarks since hotter-than-expected inflation prompted money markets and some economists to call a 25-basis-points hike next month. That would lift the cash rate to 4.35% — a level not seen since November 2011.
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