MELBOURNE: Australia’s central bank said yesterday it may follow its peers in cutting interest rates if the global economy did not improve, shifting to an easing bias from a neutral stance in place since last November.
In a surprisingly direct statement, Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) governor Ian Macfarlane said that the global economy had not picked up in the way the bank had hoped, prompting him to lower his forecast for Australian gross domestic product (GDP) growth to 3% in calendar 2003 from an earlier prediction of 3.75%.