Halister News

(Bloomberg) -- Analysts say they’ll be scouring Taiwan’s first public release of central bank minutes for clues on whether policy makers are moving toward their first interest-rate increase since June 2011.

• NOTE: Central bank said in January it will start releasing minutes of its monetary policy meetings starting from June, when it held the policy rate for a fourth straight quarter
• DBS economist Ma Tieying says she will focus on comments on 2H economic outlook and output gap, a repeated focus of the central bank
  • Continued narrowing of output gap would be favorable condition for rate hike
• Barclays economist Angela Hsieh says she will look at comments on inflation, especially as currency strength may affect consumer prices
  • Market will also be concerned about central bank’s view on TWD, especially its attitude toward U.S. Treasury’s semi-annual report on FX practices
  • A rate hike in 4Q is possible if outlook for iPhone sales is positive and GDP growth reaches 2.3% as projected by Barclays in 2017
  • As the central bank has never released minutes before, markets will be curious about meeting proceedings and stance of each board member
• Yuanta Securities Investment Consulting chief economist Woods Chen says he’ll look for comments on whether currency strength has affected the local economy
  • He will also look for comments on low inflation, whether domestic demand has weakened and the impact of falling numbers of Chinese tourists
  • Doesn’t expect minutes to be too detailed this time, though they may be expanded in the future

To contact the reporters on this story: Argin Chang in Taipei at achang153@bloomberg.net; Justina Lee in Hong Kong at jlee1489@bloomberg.net To contact the editors responsible for this story: Robin Ganguly at rganguly1@bloomberg.net Samson Ellis, Sarah McDonald