The Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) has flagged further increases in interest rates but anyone hoping for a pointer to the likely frequency of further rises will find themselves just as much in the dark as they were before.

The central bank’s November board minutes released on Tuesday are consistent with another increase in the cash rate at the December 1 meeting, but there is no obvious sign the RBA is committed to that course of action.

In the minutes of the November 3 meetingthe RBA said there had been a “relatively limited amount of new data on the economy” since the previous board meeting on October 6.

The minutes said the information to hand, including data showing less weakness in the labour market than expected earlier in the year, had been consistent with the conclusions reached by the board in October, with conditions in the global and Australian economies better than expected earlier in the year and an improved outlook for growth over the next few years.

This assessment in the minutes is the same as the more extensive round-up in the quarterly monetary policy statement the RBA released on November 6, three days after the board meeting.

At that meeting the board’s members decided to repeat October’s quarter percentage point increase in the cash rate, bringing the interest rate benchmark to 3.5 per cent.

The board said it was conscious of the risks the economy faced.

On the downside, they included potentially fragile confidence, the waning of the fiscal stimulus and the constraining impact on growth of the high exchange rate.

On the upside, the board worried that leaving interest rate slow for a long time “carried its own risks”, presumably consumer and asset price inflation, although that was not spelled out.

After considering the pros and cons, the board decided it was “prudent to take a further step to lessen the degree of monetary stimulus”.

And there is more to come, although its timing is still up in the air.

“Looking ahead, members expected that if economic conditions evolve as expected, further gradual adjustment in the cash rate would most likely be appropriate over time, though the pace of adjustment remained an open question,” the minutes said.

That appears to be implying rate rises will probably be the same size as those in October and November, a quarter of a percentage point, but that they may not be announced every month.

According, RBA watchers will be sensitive to economic data released between now and its next monetary policy meeting.

AAP