Interview Zeti confident Malaysia’s inflation will remain contained

by **Cals** Sun 13 Apr 2014, 23:57

Interview Zeti confident Malaysia’s inflation will remain contained

Business & Markets 2014

Written by Bloomberg

Sunday, 13 April 2014 18:27

By Aki Ito, Jeanna Smialek and Liau Y-Sing
April 13 (Bloomberg) -- Malaysia’s central bank Governor Zeti Akhtar Aziz said the country’s accelerating inflation doesn’t make her nervous, and signaled confidence price increases will remain contained and moderate in 2016.
“We don’t see these second-round effects emerging” from faster price increases, Zeti, 66, said in an interview in Washington yesterday. “We know the source of the inflation. It is not induced from strong demand, because this is a period when demand is quite modest.”
Bank Negara Malaysia has kept its benchmark interest rate at 3 percent since May 2011, and the fastest price increases in almost three years prompted Nomura Holdings Inc. and Citigroup Inc. to predict the central bank will raise borrowing costs this year. The central bank will probably raise interest rates by 25 basis points to 50 basis points by the first quarter of 2015, according to Vishnu Varathan, a Singapore-based economist at Mizuho Bank Ltd.
“The central bank would need to anchor inflationary pressure before the implementation” of a goods and services tax next year, said Ho Woei Chen, a Singapore-based economist at United Overseas Bank Ltd. “We expect inflation to be higher in the first half than the second half of this year.”
Signs of financial imbalances will also factor into policy decisions, because a prolonged period of accommodation could encourage investors to misprice risk and misallocate resources, Zeti said.
State Subsidies

“The situation is very dynamic, and so we would look at very closely these developments going forward,” she said. While those risks aren’t significant for now, the central bank needs to be “anticipatory” and “will continue to monitor” them, she said.
Consumer prices in Southeast Asia’s third-largest economy rose 3.5 percent in February from a year earlier after authorities cut state subsidies to rein in the fiscal deficit. Inflation will probably accelerate somewhat next year as a result of tax increases and then moderate to about 3 percent in 2016, Zeti said.
Growth in investment “is expanding the capacity of the economy,” she said. “When you expand the capacity and you have moderating demand, consumption demand, that doesn’t produce an inflationary condition.”
Zeti indicated that Malaysia has weathered well the U.S. Federal Reserve’s policy changes, which have spurred capital outflows across emerging market economies. Fed officials began to signal about a year ago that they might start scaling back their asset-purchase program, and announced in December they would begin to trim monthly purchases of bonds.
Ringgit Decline

“We fared better than we expected” and “there was no disruption in credit flows,” Zeti said. “It did not have an effect on our real economy.”
The ringgit’s decline, a consequence of those outflows, hasn’t made it harder to keep inflation in check, she said. The ringgit closed at 3.237 per dollar in Kuala Lumpur on April 11, a decline of about 6.3 percent from a year earlier. The Malaysian currency hasn’t weakened “that much,” Zeti said.
The central bank chief added that the Malaysian currency shouldn’t be internationalized until a developed domestic foreign-exchange market is in place. Major changes shouldn’t be introduced in unstable times such as these when central banks across the world are beginning to normalize policy, she said.
Zeti has served as head of the Malaysian central bank for 14 years. Asked about her plans after her current five-year term ends in 2016, she said she hasn’t thought “that far ahead.”
“I look at the things that I would like to do and achieve, and quite a lot of them have been done already,” she said. “There are just one or two things that I would like to do” before stepping down, such as completing her work on Islamic finance, she said.