One of the most hawkish forecasters of the economy, Commonwealth Bank, has delayed the timing of its prediction for the Reserve Bank of Australia's first interest rate rise this cycle to August 2015 from February.
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CBA's new forecast still has the RBA tightening in advance of the United States Federal Reserve by just one month.
The RBA's acceptance of macroprudential regulation to cool the housing market has also weighed on CBA's forecasts, in that targeting house prices will in effect buy the RBA time, suggesting rates will be on hold at a record low 2.5 per cent for longer.
"We suspect that this shift in thinking towards alternative tools was done reluctantly," said CBA chief economist Michael Blythe. "But it does indicate a greater reluctance to use interest rates than we had thought likely."
Mr Blythe had been one of the earliest economists to call for the RBA to lift the cash rate, and, while almost all economists now believe the next move for the central bank will be up, traders are still pricing in the chance of an interest rate cut by June 2015.
Goldman Sachs Asset Management head of fixed income in Asia-Pacific, Philip Moffitt, has been one of the most high-profile experts advocating further easing.
The RBA will be craving certainty before it makes a decision on the direction of policy, said Mr Blythe. The Australian Bureau of Statistics' inability to accurately measure the unemployment situation as well as the central bank's preference for a lower Australian dollar will only add to its neutral bias, the economist argued.
"So time is the issue. The RBA needs more of it to assess emerging trends. They are prepared to buy it through macroprudential initiatives. And near-term inflation trends offer some," Mr Blythe said.
The plunge in the price of oil and downgrades to global growth have quashed expectations of high inflation in advanced economies, including in Australia where the last read on inflation was a benign annual rate of 2.6 per cent on an annual basis.
However, CBA still thinks inflation could be a risk for the RBA if the currency declines, and domestic inflation remains high relative to disappointing growth in wages.
"This gap between wages/domestic inflation is an indication that there are price pressures at work that don't respond to the economic cycle or the RBA," CBA's economics team said in a report.
Mr Blythe has also changed his forecast for the first interest rate hike from the Fed, which is poised to end its $US4 trillion ($4.5 trillion) stimulus program this week. CBA now has the Fed raising rates in September instead of July.