Rate-hike path is data dependent, says BOC’s Poloz

Bloomberg

Bank of Canada (BOC) Governor Stephen Poloz said whether he’s done with hiking altogether is a
“data-dependent question,” adding the economy continues to work through headwinds that warrant stimulative rates.
Asked at a press briefing in Washington about investor expectations that the Canadian central bank’s rate normalisation has come to an end, Poloz said market pricing seems to be consistent with interest rates “on hold for a while.”
“What’s a while, I don’t know,” said Poloz, who spoke to reporters on the sidelines of the International Monetary Fund meetings. “Once again, that’s a data-dependent notion.”
“We don’t make policy day to day, we just read the data the same way the market does,” he said. “I’m certainly not going to front-run any of our policy discussions.”
The Bank of Canada, which has raised borrowing costs five times since mid-2017, has stopped talking about the need to raise interest rates in recent weeks and turned the focus instead towards keeping stimulus in place as the country copes with a slowdown. Poloz, whose next policy decision is April 24, struck a similar tone in Washington.
In the last rate decision on March 6, “we said pretty clearly, conditions warrant a rate of interest below neutral,” Poloz said. “So it’s obvious that we’re still working on some headwinds or things that are keeping the economy getting all the way home. That’s as far as I can go at this stage.”
Poloz also dismissed the idea the central bank has any specific target it expects borrowing costs will eventually get to. The idea of a neutral range — which the Bank of Canada has estimated at between 2.5 percent and 3.5 percent — is just a “concept.” The central bank’s current policy rate is 1.75 percent.
“It’s an imprecise science and so when you try to impose precision on it, it’s just going to be frustrating because it doesn’t have the degree of meaning that you’d like to attach to it,” Poloz said.