In some respects, the most negative parts, I'm with her:
"Australians] will be a bit more pleasantly surprised than negatively surprised over the course of 2024," Westpac group chief economist Luci Ellis said.She should have better insight than most.Until October 2023, Ms Ellis was an assistant governor at the RBA, responsible for its economic forecasts, before she left to take up her new role at Westpac.
At some point through 2024, towards the end of the year, probably, they [the RBA] will have a bit more confidence that inflation is going to be back within the band by 2025 and they'll start to be considering at what point they can take away some of that restrictive nature of policy," Dr Ellis explained.
Dr Ellis predicts "one or two" rate cuts by the end of 2024.
Dr Ellis will also be keeping a close eye on underemployment."You'll see employers focus on the hours that people are working and so you'll have fewer people, working longer hours, and you'll see more underemployment as well as unemployment," she explained."We actually think that underemployment margin is likely to be an important part of the economy's response to slowing demand and tighter policy."
Dr Ellis expects, overall, prices are more likely to rise than fall nationally in 2024."It's absolutely true that if someone had told you that interest rates would have increased by more than 4 percentage points, and that household incomes, on average, were declining in real terms, that you wouldn't have expected house prices to be increasing the way they have this year," she told ABC's The Business.
ABC Business
(But that bloke Ceteris Paribus has a way of infiltrating the best of all possible outcomes and incomes)
