MNI BRIEF: Rate Hike Talk "Difficult to Reconcile", RBA's Lowe

Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Philip Lowe has said he finds it "difficult to understand" why the market is pricing in an interest rate hike in Australia next year or early 2023.

In a speech on Tuesday, Lowe repeated the RBA view that conditions for official rates to rise from the current record low of 0.10% would not be met until 2024 based on the inflation outlook.

"The current OIS curve implies a cash rate of around 25 basis points by end of 2022, 60 basis points at the end of 2023 and close to 100 basis points at the end of 2024," he said.

Lowe said these expectations were "difficult to reconcile" with the RBA view, which is that inflation will not be sustainably within the 2-3% RBA target range until 2024.

"We want to see inflation around the middle of the target range and have reasonable confidence that inflation will not fall below the 2–3 per cent band again," Lowe said.

Inflation is at 3.8% as at Q2, but jumped sharply due to one off factors such as a removal of publicly funded childcare and is expected to drop back significantly in Q3.