Housing market worries not keeping me up at night: RBA assistant governor Guy Debelle
The Australian housing market is not in danger of collapsing, RBA assistant governor Guy Debelle has told delegates at an Adelaide mortgage conference today.
Debelle says there is no oversupply of housing in the country with households well able to manage their debt levels while mortgage arrears remain very low.
He played down concerns of US or Europe-style house price falls
"[Housing risk] is not something that keeps me awake at night," Debelle said while taking part in a panel discussion at the Mortgage & Finance Association of Australia (MFAA) industry Leaders Panel Forum in Adelaide.
However, he did not express the same confidence in Europe saying a “day of reckoning” was coming for the eurozone, Reuters reported.
Debelle’s comments follow an earlier June speech by RBA governor Glenn Stevens in which he said the current interest rate cutting cycle was not aimed at boosting house prices or “re-igniting a boom in borrowing”
In a speech titled “The Glass half full” Stevens said one thing Australia should not do is “try to engineer a return to the boom” or create the wrong kind of confidence in the economy.
“The kind of confidence based on nothing more than expectations of ever-increasing housing prices, with the associated willingness to continue increasing leverage, on the assumption that this is a sure way to wealth, would not be the right kind,” he said.
