Apart from a brief period after the global financial crisis, returns on equity for the major Australian banks have consistently been around 15 per cent and even higher in some years. Their performance has been helped by a long run of consistent economic growth in Australia – we haven’t had a recession in over 25 years.
We see the current stance of monetary policy as likely to remain appropriate as long as incoming information about the economy remains broadly consistent with our outlook of moderate economic growth, a strong labor market, and inflation near our symmetric 2 percent objective.