Good morning, and welcome to the ABC’s finance blog. I’ll be guiding you through the latest market action for the next few hours.<\/p>\n
The “big news” today will likely be the surge in\u00a0inflation\u00a0\u2014 to its highest level in\u00a0two-and-a-half years, driven by higher fuel prices as a result of the Iran war.<\/p>\n
The Reserve Bank will no doubt be scrutinising these figures to determine whether the economy was overheated (even before the war began), with markets pricing in a roughly 80% chance\u00a0of another interest rate rise next Tuesday.<\/p>\n
What to expect from inflation data<\/p>\n
The ABS will release its latest consumer price index (CPI) at 11:30am AEST, and economists are predicting inflation will have risen to 4.8% in the March quarter. Around one-third of this inflation spike is likely to be the result of more expensive fuel.<\/p>\n
If that turns out to be the case, it would be a huge jump since the 3.7% inflation we saw in the December quarter\u00a0<\/p>\n
It would also be the\u00a0highest inflation rate since the September 2023 quarter, a period when living costs jumped 5.3% \u2014 and the RBA was still in the midst of its previous rate-hiking cycle.<\/p>\n
“Overall, the Q1 [first quarter] data should confirm that inflation was too high and broad\u2011based ahead of the Iran shock but is likely to fall short of fuelling the RBA\u2019s concern that domestic pressures were accelerating into early 2026,” NAB chief economist Sally Auld wrote in a note to clients.<\/p>\n
“Regardless, the real impact of the Middle East conflict will emerge in Q2 [the second quarter], meaning that the main implication of today\u2019s data will be to set the starting point for inflation at the beginning of the conflict.”<\/p>\n
Anyway, sit back, grab a coffee (or tea), and I’ll be back with more updates shortly!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Good morning, and welcome to the ABC’s finance blog. I’ll be guiding you through the latest market action…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":415586,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[11466,19594,114,2288,3151,1247,85,46,190,2378,5839,19593,1010,19595,196],"class_list":["post-415585","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-asx","tag-aud","tag-business","tag-dollar","tag-dow-jones","tag-gold","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-markets","tag-nasdaq","tag-oil","tag-sp","tag-sp-500","tag-usd","tag-wall-street"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415585","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=415585"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/415585\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/415586"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=415585"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=415585"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=415585"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}