Business confidence resilient to financial market turmoil

The latest quarterly business survey responses indicate that the more uncertain global economic outlook is dampening business confidence, but only at the margin. While cautiously optimistic regarding the outlook for sales, the balance of opinion among businesses' regarding investment and employment is still strongly positive. Inflation expectations have eased, however, suggesting that the effects on consumer price inflation from the past run-up in commodity prices is widely perceived to be temporary. This lends further support to our view that interest rates will remain low for a long time.