RBNZ Deputy Governor Christian Hawkesby said the strategy now is to get the cash rate “comfortably above neutral” to bring down core inflation. And, “that will afford us some breathing space to see how things are playing out.”
“Once we get the OCR up into that 4%-4.25% level we’re seeing things evenly balanced from there,” he added. “So we’d put equal weight on having to put the OCR up as we would putting it down.”
“The economy will evolve differently than our projections. There will be shocks that come along. There’ll be data that’s different than the forecast. And we’ll just keep coming back to what does it mean for our mandates,” Hawkesby said. “We certainly are projecting an environment where the economy cools.”
