The above chart shows the yields for Australian Government Bonds, both nominal bonds and indexed bonds, as at the end of last week (although you can adjust the pricing date to any trading day of 2016). A simple way to determine the market’s inflation expectations over different timeframes is to simply subtract the difference. If you look hover the mouse over each line chart around the maturity date of circa 2020, the difference in yields is in the vicinity of 1.2% to 1.3% … low inflation expectations indeed and certainly a lot lower than the RBA target of 2% to 3%.
So if the RBA achieves its target, then these Australian Government indexed bonds will prove to be pretty reasonable performers … or at least relative to their nominal counterparts. I do know that most of the financial planning industry are still using 2.5% as their inflation target, or at least between 2% and 3% … clearly the market is currently thinking this is way too high and lower inflation than most of us expect should be expected.
PS … it also means the RBA cash rate is very likely to decrease.