The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) and the major trading banks may play the most visible role in setting interest rates, but in many cases they are being reactive rather than proactive.
A wide range of external factors feed into their decision-making process, including, in no small part, our collective behaviour as investors and savers, borrowers and consumers. Then there’s the rate of inflation and wages growth, foreign currency exchange, the economic health of our trading partners, and the interest rates paid by local banks to borrow money from overseas.
Suddenly it’s not so easy to figure out where interest rates are headed, even in the short term.
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