SYDNEY, Sept. 30 — Australia’s Big Four banks all on Wednesday announced they would raise interest rates following the central bank’s decision to lift the cash rate to a 15-year high.
The Commonwealth Bank, Westpac, ANZ and National Australia Bank, which together hold over 70 percent of household mortgages nationwide, announced separately that they will raise variable home loan rates by 0.25 percentage points from October.
It comes after the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA)’s Monetary Policy Board on Tuesday voted unanimously to raise the cash rate target from 4.35 percent to 4.60 percent, the highest level since November 2011.
Angus Sullivan, the group executive for retail banking at the Commonwealth Bank, said on Wednesday that the RBA’s decision to raise the cash rate for the fourth time so far in 2026 came amid persistent inflation and ongoing global uncertainty.
Data released earlier on Wednesday by the Australian Bureau of Statistics showed that annual headline inflation rose from 3.5 percent in July to 4.0 percent in August.
The Australian Broadcasting Corporation reported that the inflation figure was slightly lower than the 4.1 percent forecast by economists and reduced the odds of the Monetary Policy Board raising the cash rate at its next meeting at the start of November.
(Namibia Daily News/Xinhua)
