RBA board member Ian Harper said there’s “still plenty of excess capacity in the economy”. The tendency for monetary stimulus to product an asset-price bubble is “way off where we’re presently headed”. Policymakers indeed wanted asset prices to be increasing to speed up investment. Harper added, “the bank can continue to buy bonds for as long as it likes, there’s no obstacle to that.”
“The recent changes that the Fed made, well that was to bring them up to where we are basically,” he said. “We’ve never religiously or rigidly interpreted the timeframe over which we would seek the inflation rate to be within the target band.”
