THE Reserve Bank has produced the first public estimate of the number of times it expects to raise interest rates in the coming months.

RESERVE Bank governor Glenn Stevens has declared himself at odds with Coalition finance spokesman Barnaby Joyce and questioned Mr Joyce's fitness for the job, telling a parliamentary committee he had "yet to meet a finance minister who has ever mused any possibility about debt default of his own country".

THE Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development says Australia's unemployment rate has stabilised and will not reach either the peak of 8.5 per cent predicted in the May Budget or the lower peak of 6.75 per cent forecast in this month's mid-year budget review.

US retail sales for October will be released today and market watchers will use the result to gauge how the US economic recovery is faring. In September, retail sales fell 1.5 per cent as the government's "cash for clunkers" car program wound down. For October, economists are expecting sales to..read more

The screaming headline, "Wage rise stokes inflation fear", with which one newspaper greeted the Fair Pay Commission's minimum wage decision last week didn't disturb me so much as remind me how far we've come since the bad old days of economic mismanagement.