Australia politics live: Adam Bandt ‘truly sorry’ to see Lidia Thorpe resign from Greens; question time returns

You know summer is really over when the RBA board turns up for its first meeting of the year, on the first Tuesday of February (tomorrow).

(Staffers must have a shrine for the wily wonk who made sure January 1992 was the last time board members had to disturb their beach or skiing holidays to turn up during the first month of the year. Even the GFC didn’t disturb their break.)

Your correspondent has been very much off the grid for the past week or so (a shrine of eternal thanks burns for those who stopped the damning of Tassie’s Franklin River four score years ago), and it’s a little surprising to see how little has changed when it comes to interest rate expectations.

Just as I left it, investors very much expect a 25 basis point increase in the RBA’s cash rate to 3.35% tomorrow. (It used to be a two-in-three chance, now it’s a three-in-four one.)

Similarly, a peak rate looms at about 3.6% if those bets are right. And that’s despite the higher-than-tipped annualised CPI for the December quarter coming in at 7.8%. (Market economists had been expecting a 7.5% result).

CBA, the biggest issuer of mortgages in Australia, sees a “non-trivial risk”, at 25%, that the RBA will raise the cash rate by a larger 40bp to 3.5% tomorrow.

Slightly at odds with that hawkish take, though, is CBA’s view that a big hike, if it were to occur, would then be followed by a pause.

It would seem more likely that a return to large rises (there were four 50bp hikes in a row between last June and September) would be a sign the RBA has more work to do, rather than taking time off to assess their extra handiwork.

Separately, NAB has put out its quarterly ‘consumer stress’ index for the December quarter. Not too surprisingly, stress is on the rises “but remains comfortably below the survey average”.

“Consumer stress is highest among those aged 30-49 and in the $35-50,000 income group,” NAB says, adding that about four-in-10 consumers “have cut back or stopped buying coffees or lunches, car trips to save petrol and entertainment”.

Still, “if consumers are anxious about an impending economic slowdown, they are not yet revealing it, remaining relatively upbeat about the economy”, NAB’s chief economist Alan Oster says.

We’ll get ABS’s retail sales figures for the December quarter later this morning, so we’ll see if that view translated into spending …or not.