Welcome to “The Cyborg Analyst” by Prattle. This report provides weekly, quantitative insights on G-10 currency central banks.
As regular readers likely know, Prattle was recently acquired by Liquidnet. This transition has resulted in Prattle taking on the broader role of developing NLP-focused AI tools for the asset management community. As CEO of Prattle, I will in turn be transitioning my time away from writing analysis based on Prattle central bank data and toward the broader agenda of writing about AI in finance. Accordingly, this will be our final weekly report specifically about central banking.
While I still intend to cover central banks as part of my broader work, we will no longer provide a stand-alone weekly research piece containing forecasts of upcoming monetary policy decisions. Thank you for being a loyal reader, and a special thanks to my colleague, long-time editor and content guru, Jon Ryan. If it were not for Jon, you would all be subjected to my tendency toward imprecise language, run-on sentences and grammatical errors.
The Week in Central Banking
We are closing our Cyborg Analyst coverage on what is perhaps the quietest week in global central banking this year. The only scheduled central bank communication this week is a speech from Christopher Kent at the RBA. On the heels of last week’s rate hold and indications of continually slowing economic growth, Kent is likely to sound dovish while pointing to a rate cut in the coming months. This coincides with the RBA’s dovish tone (momentum -0.25), though it is worth note that RBA policymakers are slightly less dovish than they were just a few weeks ago. The rebound in tone reflects the fact that weakening economic conditions have now levelled off, despite the trade war-induced slide in recent months. This more neutral tone suggests a lack of urgency to cut rates any further, and perhaps even that policymakers are hoping the rate cuts they have already made this year will be enough to buoy the Aussie economy. Despite this relatively less dovish tone, the base case remains that at least one more RBA rate cut is likely in 2019.
Thank you again for being a loyal reader, and feel free to contact me directly with any questions or suggested writing topics going forward.
Evan A. Schnidman
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