Australia shocks everyone with a surprise rate cut to 2.75%

Rate has bee unchanged since December.

According to BBVA, at its monthly policy meeting, the Reserve Bank of Australia cut interest rates to a record low of 2.75%.

While anticipated by a number of market participants, the consensus was for no change, after the RBA had kept the rate unchanged at 3.00% since December.

Here's more from BBVA:

The accompanying policy statement suggests the cut was aimed at curbing the strength of the AUD: “The exchange rate,… has been little changed at a historically high level over the past 18 months, which is unusual given the decline in export prices and interest rates during that time.

“ With the inflation outlook well within the official 2-3% medium-term target range, the RBA had flagged the scope for further rate cuts and “decided to use some of that scope.”

Today’s action brings the cumulative rate reductions to 200bps since November 2011 as the RBA seems to stimulate growth in Australia’s non-mining domestic sectors. While further rate cuts cannot be ruled out, under our baseline of 3.0% growth in 2013, we expect rates to remain at their new level through the rest of the year. The AUD depreciated sharply following the announcement, to below 1.02 against the USD, its weakest level since mid-2012.

Reaching the people who run Asia's businesses is harder than it used to be.

Inboxes are crowded. Attention is short. The executives you most want to reach — the founders, CFOs, and operators who actually move budgets — are the hardest to find through the usual channels. If you're building a company, a category, or a reputation, you already know this.

We've spent twenty years building the room they read. Singapore Business Review is where senior decision makers in Singapore and across Southeast Asia come for business coverage they can't get elsewhere — in print, online, and in person at the summits and roundtables we host across seven markets.

If you have something these readers should know about — a point of view worth publishing, a product worth their attention, an event worth their time — we'd like to hear what you're trying to do.

Book a meeting

| Or download the media kit (PDF)

240,000 senior readers quarterly in print Top 1,700 Singapore companies reached

7 markets across Southeast Asia