Judo Bank chief executive Joseph Healy:“I’m nervous about the psyche that says ‘she’ll be right’.”Credit:Justin McManus
The change was a sign the lender was preparing for an environment of rising interest rates,Healy said,as he painted a cautious economic outlook in which rising inflation would be the key challenge.
“I think the key is to prepare for the worst,and hope for the best,” Healy said at a media event in Sydney.
Healy,a banking veteran who previously ran National Australia Bank’s business bank,said the key question facing Australia’s economy was how aggressive the Reserve Bank would be in trying to tame inflation.
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Judo,founded in 2015,predicts the cash rate will hit 2.5 per cent by the end of the year,compared with 0.85 per cent today. Healy said its borrowers were fairly well-placed to weather the challenge of rising inflation.
However,he said the bank was not ignoring the possibility of a more grim scenario in which rates rose further,hitting the housing market harder.
Healy said he was “paranoid about what could happen in the economy,” and said he took little comfort from the fact that households had built up huge savings buffers in recent years.