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The Reserve Bank Of Australia (RBA)

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The role and objectives of the RBA

The Reserve Bank Of Australia (RBA) is the executive of targeted monetary policy, one of two macroeconomic weapons used to stabalise the economy. The RBA has two main responsibilities as the central bank of Australia. First is monitoring and controlling monetary policy to achieve full employment, target inflation and influence aggregate demand. Secondly, the RBA is in charge of the oversight and regulation of the financial markets and promotes the efficiency of the nations payments system (Bernanke, Olekalns & Frank. 2014).

The objectives of the RBA are clearly defined, they’re accountable for setting an appropriate inflation targets so that the cash rate can be an effective instrument to respond to economic …show more content…

Unemployment levels are a key indicator of an economy’s health. Unemployment currently sits at 5.6% (Scutt. 2018) which is above the RBA’s Non-accelerating Inflation Rate of Unemployment (NAIRU) of 5%, expressing a contractionary gap. A contractionary gap occurs when actual output does not meet potential output (Bernanke, Olekalns & Frank. 2014) due to an underutilisation of resources. The central bank demonstrated its concern with the spare capacity of labour in the economy (RBA. 2017). However, although this is something the RBA should certainly keep an eye on for future board meetings, Figure 1.0 shows that unemployment still remains relatively low and therefore for this should not place any strain on the RBA’s decision of the outcome of the cash …show more content…

Figure 1.2 annotates that the central bank’s use of the cash rate in managing the inflation rate as it directly correlates with Figure 1.3. In recent years the inflation rate has fallen below target and currently sits at 1.9%. Although this is below the RBA’s target of 2-3%, Figure 1.3 suggests that inflation has been gradually increasing since 2016, despite the RBA not having adjusted the cash rate the same 2016 as illustrated in Figure 1.2. Therefore, although it was expressed by the RBA in February their “continuing concerns about weak household consumption” (The Sydney Morning Herald. 2018), Australia is still easing towards its long-term equilibrium without the intervention of the central bank. However, Inflation is a benchmark for aggregate demand, and this is another important aspect of consideration which could be addressed with expansionary monetary policy in order to accelerate inflation. However, as can be seen in these graphs, there is no sense of urgency to implement expansionary monetary

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