Australia’s Central Bank Hopes to Revive Economy’s ‘Animal Spirits’

The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) is not content to let its accommodative monetary policy do all the heavy lifting.

Still, the central bank is expected to allow its monetary largesse to continue flowing through the economy at least until next year. According to futures data aggregated by Bloomberg, the vast majority of traders see the RBA’s benchmark cash rate remaining at an all-time low of 2.5 percent through the end of the year, with a tiny minority betting on a further cut of 25 basis points.

As Australia’s resource boom winds down, and investment in this area wanes, the RBA is keen to find growth in the non-mining sectors of the economy.

The most obvious beneficiaries of the RBA’s monetary policy are rate-sensitive sectors such as real estate, which until recently had been firmly in bubble mode.

Of course, miners and non-miners whose industries depend on export activity would benefit from a lower exchange rate. But despite the RBA’s easy-money policy, the Australian dollar continues to remain stubbornly high by historical standards.

The Australian dollar currently trades near USD0.93, within shouting distance of its year-to-date high of USD0.95 in early July. At current levels, the aussie has risen 7.2 percent from its three-year low in late January, but it’s still down about 15.4 percent from its cycle high in mid-2011.

That’s forced the RBA to resort to other tools beyond monetary policymaking to help the non-mining sectors of the economy find growth.

One such tool is jawboning, whereby the bank literally talks down the exchange rate. Of course, the effects of that approach are typically fleeting, though the RBA did utilize it recently. The central bank believes a lower exchange rate will help make the country’s exports, particularly commodities that are already suffering from depressed prices, more competitive in the global market.

There’s also the possibility of facilitating greater coordination among the G-20, a group of the world’s 20 major economies. RBA Governor Glenn Stevens has alluded to this possibility in his remarks this past year.

In late July, he discussed this approach once again, in a speech before The Anika Foundation. Stevens lamented the subdued “animal spirits”–the sort of risk-taking that leads to the deployment of capital in pursuit of growth–in both Australia and the global economy. And he wondered if the psychology behind the current state of affairs could be mired in a “self-reinforcing equilibrium.”

Given the shortcomings of monetary policy to overcome such stasis, Stevens believes the G-20’s agenda for growth provides another avenue for defeating the doldrums of the post-Global Financial Crisis mentality.

Among the changes Stevens hopes to see are reforms to the supply side of the G-20 economies, which he believes can “impart a sense of dynamism and opportunity.”

Development of new infrastructure can be spurred through the sort of regulatory reforms and risk-sharing that invite both public and private investment.

And a regulatory regime that ensures the safety of the financial sector can remove some of the overhang from uncertainty.

And finally free-trade agreements should actually embody the principles that their names suggest.

To be sure, this level of cooperation among such a diverse group of nations seems far-fetched. But even incremental progress toward some of these reforms would likely yield a positive result. And the RBA is certainly using its bully pulpit to make the case for them.

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