No way to tell future central bank moves – Stevens
(3 July 2015 – Australia) Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) governor Glenn Stevens said that detecting the next interest rate move was hard to determine.
"The problem is that a central bank cannot realistically state how it will respond to all possible future states of the world," he said.
Stevens applauded the efforts of central banks around the world to explain how they may act in the future.
The situation is made worse by commentators and journalists trying to look past the typical "nuance" of public statements from central bankers, Stevens said.
"They simply want to know what will happen and when," he said.
The central bank boss likened it to astronomy, and having many radio telescopes trained on a large area of space in the hope of detecting energy from distant stars.
"Countless market and media antennae are trained on the sound of the central bank voice, trying to discern and amplify signals out of all the static around, even when the central bank has no new signal to send, and static is all there is," he said.
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