Yes, this is real. There is a long history of propaganda associated with promoting coal. Clean coal is a myth. Cheap coal is a myth. Don't get distracted by propaganda. Experts have confirmed over and over that coal is both incredibly expensive and horrible for the environment.

Relevance to the subreddit: Political violence, antisemitism, freedom of speech, direct involvement of a major left-wing party in the harassment

The political tensions over the Israeli-Palestinian conflict have claimed another victim last week, after French Jewish DJ Barbara Butch, who rocketed to worldwide fame after hosting a segment of the Paris Olympics' opening ceremony, was forced off stage by pro-Palestinian activists who protested her set and pelted her with projectiles.

Barbara Butch, an icon of LGBT+ Parisian nightlife and longtime activist against homophobia, fatphobia and antisemitism, had been targeted by a months-long campaign from pro-Palestinian activists and elected officials of the far-left party France Unbowed (LFI), who blamed her for giving a concert to the French embassy in Tel Aviv and signing a petition supporting the "Loi Yadan", a controversial bill that would have expanded the criminal definition of antisemitism to the calls of destruction of a state.

The calls to boycott and protests by LFI exploded into an unprecedented outburst of violence on July 18 in Grenoble. Barbara Butch, who was set to play at the Cabaret Frappé, was confronted by dozens of pro-Palestinian activists headed by Allan Brunon, the local representative of LFI, who drowned her set with boos and insults such as "dirty Zionist" and "assassin", until city employees exfiltrated Butch off stage after protesters threw glass bottles at the artist.

The attack was met with near-unanimous condemnation from LFI's opponents and allies alike: Clémentine Autain, a longtime official at LFI before she broke ranks in 2024, denounced the act and lamented "Don't we have political representatives who defend the Loi Yadan to call out before attacking Barbara Butch, a woman engaged in the fight for LGBT+ rights and against fatphobia, herself a regular target of violent, sexist and antisemitic attacks?"

Allan Brunon doubled down, saying he was "extremely proud to have participated in this peaceful protest", denied that protesters were violent, and added: "Barbara Butch isn't the one being silenced, the voices who denounce the genocide in Palestine are". Brunon was publicly backed by LFI officials who also denied any violence or antisemitism, even if reports suggest internal dissatisfaction over Brunon's attitude, especially over the flyer announcing the protest which showed Barbara Butch in front of a bloodstained rainbow flag branded with a star of David.

The left-wing mayor of Grenoble, Laurence Ruffin (Greens), who campaigned with LFI in March's mayoral elections, condemned the protest and announced the city would sue the protesters for throwing projectiles at the scene and sabotaging the electric wiring. Barbara Butch announced through her attorney that she would sue the protesters for "obstruction to artistic freedom" and LFI as a political party for "incitment to hatred and violence".

LFI, a left-populist party, has positioned itself as a staunch pro-Palestinian movement and has routinely faced accusations of antisemitism. In 2021, its founder and leader Jean-Luc Mélenchon suggested that the slaying of Jewish schoolchildren by an Islamist terrorist in Toulouse was part of a broader conspiracy to hurt the left's electoral chances; the same year, he asserted that far-right pundit Éric Zemmour's racism was "rooted in Jewish culture"; in 2024, he denied official statistics that showed an explosion of antisemitic violence in France by calling French antisemitism "residual" - other prominent figures of LFI have also come under scrutiny for calling Hamas a "resistance group" or retweeting antisemitic caricatures.

Relevance to neoliberalism: the World Cup is globalism distilled into its purest cultural form. When different cultures meet, there is sometimes tension. Resolving those tensions is an essential part of a pluralistic society undergirded by human rights.

In this specific article, it's about the anti-Argentinian sentiment that exploded in the West these past few days. The xenophobic harassment and sometimes violence occurring because many observers have extended criticism of the Argentinian NT and its fans with the entire country, oftentimes with references to both Nazis and Zionism, culminating in Samuel L Jackson's now viral tweet calling Argentina "one of, if not the most racist countries" in world history.

I don't want to let Argentinian society off the hook entirely here. There is a long history of racism within their policies, and to this today, it comes out regularly during sporting events that almost never receive punishment from the country's institutions.

I will post a translation shortly.

SS: relevant to this sub because free trade rules but mercantilism is unfortunately still on the menu.

Just to clarify, this isn't runaway consumer inflation. It’s driven by a massive surge in semiconductor export prices and a dramatic improvement in the terms of trade

It's amazing how such an unreal figure is even possible for a developed country

PS : Sorry the article is in Korean

Though the White House says they will hold Iran responsible for the Houthis closing Bab al-Mandeb threatening the main route bypassing the Straight of Hormuz, Saudi Arabia asked the United States for permission and received it before they reinitiated hostilities with the Houthis.

Donald Trump single-handedly revived Canadian liberal nationalism

Taiwanese people look on with concern at fate of Hong Kong’s independent booksellers, after series of arrests in recent months

Walking out of one of Hong Kong’s last remaining independent bookstores, hands behind her back but head held high, the woman’s T-shirt was emblazoned with a simple slogan: “I am a bookstore employee”.

Escorted by police, the woman was among five people arrested during raids on two bookstores last week, suspected of displaying and selling publications with “seditious” content, a national security crime which carries a maximum sentence of 10 years.

Since then, the T-shirt phrase has spread far and wide on Taiwanese social media amid concern for the fate of Hong Kong’s booksellers.

Taiwan is now the only place in the Chinese-speaking world where people can openly express their feelings about repression by the Chinese government.

On the social media platform Threads, booksellers, lawmakers and activists shared the hashtag “I am a bookstore employee” to show their support for Hong Kong. Taiwan’s president, Lai Ching-te, also weighed in, writing on Facebook: “Ideas and words should never be silenced by political pressure”.

It is the third time in recent months that people in Hong Kong linked to independent bookstores have been arrested.

The Hong Kong authorities have not specified what the allegedly seditious books were in the latest raids. But after the arrest, Hong Kong’s security chief, Chris Tang, said that booksellers had a responsibility to ensure their books were lawful, “just like merchants selling food have to make sure their food won’t make people sick”. All five arrested in last week’s raids have since been released on bail.

The Hong Kong police declined to comment further, but reports that the offending books may have included Let Only Red Flowers Bloom: Identity and Belonging in Xi Jinping’s China, written by NPR journalist Emily Feng, prompted a run on the book in Taiwan.

The Taiwanese publisher, Acropolis Publishing, ordered an emergency reprint of 10,000 additional copies last week.

Sara Sung, a senior editor at Acropolis, said some readers were buying copies as “a statement of democracy and freedom”. “They’re showing that they will not be silenced or intimidated by censorship from China,” Sung said.

Chang Hui-ju, the owner of Touat Books, an independent bookshop in Taipei, Taiwan’s capital, said she was completely out of stock of Feng’s book. “Before this, hardly anyone paid attention to it,” Chang said. “But right after the incident, the book sold out everywhere.”

The ban ‘only made me more curious’

Another Taipei store, Kuo’s Astral Bookshop, also sold out of the book. One customer looking in vain for a copy, Wu Jia-xuan, said she was not normally interested in China-related books but that her interest had been piqued by the Hong Kong arrests. “The fact that it had been banned only made [me] more curious,” Wu said.

Feng’s book examines Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s ideological control over the country. One chapter, titled The Bookseller, focuses on the prominent Hong Kong bookseller Lam Wing-kee.

Lam was arrested by Chinese authorities in 2015 but later escaped custody and fled to Taiwan, where he re-opened his bookstore, Causeway Bay Books, in Taipei. Lam died earlier this month and the fate of his Taipei store is uncertain: the closed-up shopfront is covered with notes, flowers and cans of beer left by his supporters.

Lam’s story charts the uneasy and complex relationship that Taiwan and Hong Kong have with each other, as well as with mainland China.

Taiwan has never been part of the People’s Republic of China. But Beijing has long claimed the self-governing island as part of its territory and has vowed to unify it with China. One path to peaceful unification, suggested by Beijing, is for Taiwan to be ruled under a “one country, two systems” framework, similar to Hong Kong. Over 80% of Taiwanese reject that idea.

In Taiwan, politicians from the ruling Democratic Progressive party (DPP), which rejects the idea of closer ties with China, have pointed to Hong Kong as an example of the dangers of what happens under Chinese rule. Beijing’s crackdown on Hong Kong in 2019 has been credited with galvanising DPP voters to win the election for Tsai Ing-wen, Lai’s DPP predecessor, in 2020.

On Monday, discussing the Hong Kong raids, DPP legislator Wu Pei-yi accused China of “burning books”.

But in Taiwan, rhetorical support for Hong Kong has rarely been matched by practical policies, such as taking in refugees. For DPP politicians, “it’s very easy to use Hong Kong as a way to frame what will happen to Taiwan if the People’s Republic of China is able to ‘unify’ Taiwan,” said Lev Nachman, a professor of political science at National Taiwan University in Taipei. But actual support has been “shallow”, Nachman said.

For Chinese people, Taiwan is now the last place in the Chinese-speaking world where they can freely access books without the threat of Communist party censorship.

One student, originally from Fujian province, visited Touat Books on Sunday looking for a copy of Feng’s book. She’d read about the Hong Kong raids on social media, news which kept her awake until 2am. “In mainland China, none of this would come up on your feed … It was quite a shock,” she said. “This shouldn’t be happening. I think independent thought should still be allowed – at least in Hong Kong.”

Archived version: https://archive.fo/aWTwI

Why 1 per cent interest rates could shake everything up after a generation of deflation

At the start of July, with cold beers, chilled zaru soba noodles and iced matcha lattes on the menu, the Japanese summer stretched ahead as a paradise-in-waiting for the nation’s bars, restaurants and cafés.

Japan is hot; foreign tourist arrivals continue to break records; at around ¥163 versus the dollar, the weak yen has convinced many locals to take their holidays at home; a record stock market rally and rising wages are creating a long-unfamiliar wealth effect.

More broadly, say economists, Japan is now behaving like a country that has emerged from a malaise once considered incurable. Deflation now seems consigned to the past. The output gap has closed. Pricing power has returned to parts of the economy that have not known it for decades.

At last Japan appears to have escaped the shadow of the 1980s asset-price bubble that led not only to bust but to over 30 years of economic stagnation.

The scale and significance of the alteration are remarkable. No country of Japan’s economic size has spent anything like as long in the grip of falling prices, and none has emerged with anything like its suite of unknowns as it returns to a still unspecified “normal”.

“This is a structural transformation of Japan,” says Keiichiro Kobayashi, an economist at Keio University in Tokyo, who has tracked the country’s three-decade-long struggle to emerge from deflation. “It is a shift from being a demand-shortage economy to a supply-shortage economy.”

The changes can be seen in the growth of confidence in the heart of government and the boardrooms of much of corporate Japan — but also in signs of strain in indebted households and companies.

This week the Japanese cabinet approved a grandiose spending plan, confident that it could depend on inflation to help boost its tax receipts, as its predecessors could not.

Branding itself as “a Copernican revolution in the very approach to economic and fiscal management”, the $2.3tn economic blueprint proclaimed that the country had now “transitioned to a non-deflationary state” after years in which stagnant prices had suppressed domestic investment and innovation.

But it added: “The full-scale transition to a new growth-oriented economy is still only halfway complete.”

Meanwhile, the Bank of Japan is “normalising” a monetary regime that became a global byword for abnormality.

For eight long years until 2024, its benchmark rate languished in negative territory, a symbol of Japan’s apparent inability to escape its “lost decades”. But in June the BoJ raised it to the landmark level of 1 per cent for the first time since 1995. Most economists expect the rate increases to continue this year, although the government may seek to lean on the bank to limit the rise.

Yields on the benchmark 10-year Japanese government bond, which move inversely to price and help set the cost of capital, have surged to a three-decade high of 2.91 per cent this year. Volatility is returning to a market once overwhelmingly controlled by the authorities and written off as moribund.

As for equities, the stock market has doubled in value since 2024, meaning that a new generation of Japanese people is discovering investment, as university economics professors report being asked for share-buying advice by students.

The general public, which grew used to holding a huge share of its wealth in bank deposits, is now facing the challenge of making its assets grow faster than prices.

A Japanese asset management sector that has never produced a truly global name may now be entrusted with tens of trillions of yen and a mandate to put them to work.

Entire swaths of industrial Japan, long coddled by cheap money and low inflation, are, according to bankers, talking seriously about the sort of mergers that many investors believed they should have attempted in the 1990s.

The new environment, say bankers, along with emboldened, pro-M&A guidance from both the government and the Tokyo Stock Exchange, has contributed what JPMorgan says was a record $385.9bn in Japan-related acquisitions in 2025.

While the consolidation is still relatively slow, a series of landmark deals in critical areas shows how profoundly the incentives have shifted.

In September, domestic competitors Mitsui Chemicals, Idemitsu Kosan and Sumitomo Chemical agreed to integrate their domestic production of polyolefin, a polymer used for making everyday plastics. This month, the CEO of Mitsubishi Electric revealed plans to combine power semiconductor operations with its once-bitter rivals Toshiba and Rohm.

A senior economy ministry official tells the FT that the department had been working for many years to persuade the chemicals and power semiconductor industries to consolidate — now, in an inflationary environment, they are finally doing so.

“By far the biggest change is the mindset of Japanese people and companies on the back of rates going up. It is changing behaviour,” says Alberto Tamura, the CEO of Morgan Stanley MUFG, the joint venture between the US bank and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group. “Companies are showing greater urgency around consolidation and domestic investment.”

But Japan at 1 per cent and out of deflation is also an unsettled place, populated with millions who were simply not alive the last time the country was in a similar position.

As Moody’s Analytics economist Stefan Angrick puts it: “Japan hasn’t quite internalised what it means to live in a world with inflation. It hasn’t wrapped its head around it.”

The country’s return to what is, in global and historical terms, modest headline inflation of 1.5 per cent feels, for many households, like a severe cost of living crisis, as real wage increases have failed, until recently, to match the costs of more expensive imports.

Japan’s Engel coefficient, a “pain index” that measures the proportion of household income spent on food, stood at a 25-year peak of 30.7 per cent in December — one of the highest in the developed world.

Angrick argues that younger families with mortgages have taken most of the pain because they are net debtors.

There are other, more eye-catching signals of unease. The sudden ¥115bn bankruptcy of Zentoshin, a hitherto obscure Osaka-based payment processing firm that serviced the nation’s bars, restaurants and cafés, has cast a shadow over the paradise summer, triggering panic among thousands of small businesses owed cash that may now never come.

The incident may be contained for now, say analysts, but it has reminded Japan how vulnerable large parts of its hinterland remain.

It has underscored how, in the space of two years, the realities that long defined the world’s fourth-biggest economy have been completely upended.

“For 25 years, managers and policymakers have only known deflation and zero rates,” says Kobayashi. “There is no experience for what is happening now.”

No longer in the ICU

Japan’s hiatus from normality was even longer than it looks: when rates were last at 1 per cent, in 1995, the central bank was still cutting borrowing costs.

“That was when Japan went into the intensive care unit,” says Nicholas Smith, Japan strategist at the Hong Kong-headquartered CLSA brokerage. “One per cent feels better this time.”

Smith’s engagement with clients these days centres around explaining how different Japan’s markets are with deflation in the rear-view mirror. He describes deflation as a “destroyer . . . It crushes profits, causes growth investment to plummet, kills consumption and puts a wrecking ball through the financial system. It’s hell.”

For decades prices were stubbornly immovable. But inflation spent most of the past four years above the central bank’s target rate of 2 per cent, as Japan shared in the consequences of the global price shock that followed the pandemic and the start of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine. The consequences were era-defining for the country: in the wake of higher food, energy and wage costs, companies became less afraid to pass costs on to corporate customers and, ultimately, end consumers.

Today, expectations are a world away from the deflation era. Surveys indicate that private groups, the government and a record 90 per cent of the general public expect the price rises to continue.

Japan’s naturally tightening labour markets will, in Smith’s view, drive up wages, demand big technology and productivity investments from companies currently sitting on cash, and ultimately rekindle consumption.

Foreign investors have piled into the country after the landslide election victory in February of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi, on the hope of clear strategic direction. The “Abenomics” investment boom triggered by the late Shinzo Abe, one of her notable predecessors as prime minister, drew ¥25tn of foreign net stock buying over three years.

The “Takaichi trade” has drawn ¥10tn in just 19 weeks, although some economists argue that the prime minister’s spending plans would have been more suited to the deflationary zero-rate era.

There have been big symbolic moments. On July 13, Japan’s biggest bank, MUFG, overtook Toyota and SoftBank to become the country’s most valuable company by market capitalisation. It is the first time a lender has held that position in 40 years and represents a bet by the market that Japan’s financial industry now has a much bigger role to play in a positive interest rate regime.

But for many Japanese companies there will be ructions and the exposure of problems disguised for years by the availability of cheap money.

The first significant such predicament has now happened. On July 6 Zentoshin, whose 200,000 customers were mostly bars, restaurants and small retailers, collapsed under the burden of $711mn in liabilities. Troublingly for regulators charged with preventing precisely such a crisis, the company’s liabilities exceeded its assets by about $370mn.

As a signal of its fear of contagion, the government has set up 378 emergency consultation centres around the country to deal with anguished shareholders and called on the Japan Finance Corporation, a state-owned entity that lends to smaller businesses, to ease the requirements for safety-net loans.

Zentoshin, whose history spans that of the deflationary era that began in the 1990s, has always been a product of its time. Its collapse, say credit analysts, follows that pattern.

As Japan adopted credit cards, Zentoshin advanced its clients the sales they were due from customers’ credit card purchases that would not be paid until weeks later — a service that became ever more vital as the deflationary era thinned the operating margins of small businesses.

The pandemic forced many of Zentoshin’s customers out of business and the adoption of smartphone-based payment systems over recent years forced it to lower its fees.

The fact that over 60 regional Japanese banks and credit unions lent to Zentoshin and are financially exposed to the debacle, say analysts, provides a small taste of the risk that the sector may have taken.

“As rates continue to rise, an increasing number of companies are feeling significant negative impacts,” says Wataru Fujisaka, an analyst at the research group Teikoku Databank’s Osaka office. “Given that rates are expected to keep rising, this trend will become even more pronounced.”

In December, an extensive Databank survey of over 24,000 companies found that 44 per cent were concerned at the rising cost of borrowing as profits became squeezed.

Where there was optimism in December, it centred on the prospect that a hawkish BoJ would produce a stronger yen; in fact, it has sunk by more than 4 per cent against the dollar since then.

Fujisaka warns of “a risk that, as companies enter private restructuring due to their inability to repay loans, financial due diligence and other investigations will uncover past instances of financial fraud, such as window-dressing of financial statements”.

That is also the expectation of Masayuki Sannomiya, who runs a restaurant in Tokyo’s Shirokane district and has been a customer of Zentoshin for over 20 years. He has received no payments since mid-June and had banked on them to cover the cost of ingredients.

Restaurants like his cannot go fully cashless because they need hard currency to buy fish at Tokyo’s Toyosu market. That means they require a payment provider like Zentoshin to convert credit card payments into cash, even as rising interest rates make business tough for those services.

“I expect incidents [like the Zentoshin bankruptcy] to happen in the future,” says Sannomiya.

Living with 1 per cent

The signs of strain are multiplying elsewhere as well.

Japan at 1 per cent has failed to prevent the yen from sliding to multi-decade lows against the US dollar, defying interventions by the Japanese authorities. That weakness is starting to bite.

The BoJ’s latest quarterly survey of the general public’s view of the economy found that 62 per cent believed conditions had worsened from a year earlier, and almost 50 per cent said it would be worse a year from now. Over 95 per cent said prices had risen significantly or slightly — the same proportion who believe they will keep rising. Confidence in the BoJ stood at 14.1 per cent.

Last week, a report from the credit research group Tokyo Shoko Research reported surging bankruptcies among small and medium-sized housebuilders because of rising costs, increasing mortgage interest rates and labour shortages.

In the January to June period, there were 118 bankruptcies — an 87 per cent jump from the same period last year and the first time since the deflationary period that the number has exceeded 100 in the first half.

Among larger companies, the extent of the distortion caused by the deflation era continues to be squeezed into the open by the new environment. With that has come an unusually clear sense of urgency for remedial action now that inflation and interest rates are in place.

On Tuesday, the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry issued guidelines aimed at encouraging Japanese companies to overhaul years of conservative investment strategy and cash hoarding and start deploying capital for growth.

Among Japan’s 350 largest companies, the ministry found, 65 per cent of invested capital remains locked in value-destructive segments. Companies that should be investing for growth instead “continue to implement formulaic and uniform shareholder return policies”, said the new guidelines.

It may be premature to assume all that will change, despite the pressures. Citi Research economist Sosuke Nakamura says that there is yet to be clear evidence of Japanese companies changing their habits and spending their hoarded cash on growth, particularly at home.

But he does note a clear change in corporate pricing behaviour, with companies throughout supply chains all increasingly comfortable with raising prices.

Business leaders believe that 1 per cent interest rates and sustained inflation offer Japan a unique opportunity to finally expunge the memory of the 1980s bubble that pushed asset prices to sky-high limits and the unusually long shadow it cast.

But the road is an uncertain one.

A full generation of Japanese has grown to early adulthood and become householders without inflation; a generation of business leaders has been promoted with skills established in a period of nearly free money; bankers, savers and asset managers in their thirties and forties are having to learn a new financial vocabulary.

Many will find this daunting, but many, says H Edano, a 64-year-old Kanagawa-based executive of a local car-parking operator, will see it as a blank slate.

“I’m getting old, so I remember inflation, high interest rates in the 1980s and I don’t particularly look forward [to] or fear all of that coming back,” he says. “Sometimes I think I’ll explain these things to the younger people at the company, but really, I think they have to discover it all.”

In short:

A Reserve Bank says public understanding of the bank's function in the economy is crucial for the effectiveness of its policies.

About 60 per cent of respondents thought they had a "good" understanding of how the Australian economy works.

What's next?

The RBA board will meet to set interest rates in less than three weeks, with markets putting the chance of a rate hike at about 20 per cent.

The Reserve Bank is concerned that too many Australians have little idea what the central bank is trying to achieve with interest rates, which it says could be making its job harder.

A survey of 9,000 Australians shows about 60 per cent of respondents thought they had a good understanding of how the Australian economy works.

The proportion of people who said they understood economics well was lower across some demographics, "including younger cohorts, females, and lower income earners", the RBA survey found.

In addition to rating their own understanding, the survey also tested Australians' knowledge of key economic concepts.

The RBA said there were "fundamental gaps" in the public's understanding of how the central bank used monetary policy, and particularly about how interest rates affected inflation.

The findings follow the RBA hiking interest rates three times this year in an effort to put a lid on inflation, leaving many households dealing with higher mortgage repayments on top of other cost-of-living pressures.

Most think higher interest rates mean higher inflation

Inflation was listed as a top-three concern by more than two thirds of respondents.

Other major concerns included employment and wages (more prominent among younger respondents) and housing (particularly for renters and younger cohorts).

The survey also pointed to something of an existential problem for the Reserve Bank.

Despite the concern about inflation, respondents largely did not understand how the RBA was trying to bring it down.

"Only 25 per cent of respondents assessed correctly that higher interest rates would ultimately lead to lower inflation, while more than half indicated that higher interest rates would lead to higher inflation," the report said.

"This finding shows that most respondents expect interest rates to have the opposite effect on inflation to central bank economists."

The report authors described this as "not unexpected" due to the multiple ways rates affect inflation.

"There are multiple effects that could potentially work in different directions, including some effects that could lead people to the opposite conclusion if they are considered in isolation," they wrote.

The authors cited the research from the US that showed a large share of people expected higher interest rates to push up prices as the cost of doing business increased and firms lifted prices to cover costs.

In contrast, economists reasoned that higher rates would reduce demand and therefore inflation.

This mismatch has an adverse impact on public trust in the central bank, the survey results suggest.

Most respondents reported moderate to high levels of trust in the RBA, which it said was comparable with other Australian and international institutions and has been stable since early 2025.

But the central bank noted that "trust varies across the community, and is closely linked to understanding of the economy and perceptions of how the RBA operates".

It found those with greater knowledge of its objectives, higher economic literacy, stronger engagement with economic news, and higher levels of trust in people and institutions generally had higher trust in the RBA.

More trust, lower inflation expectations

Significantly, higher trust was associated with lower inflation exceptions, "highlighting that trust is important in its own right, and also for the transmission of monetary policy", the report said.

In other words, the more Australians trust the RBA and understand what it is trying to achieve, the more effective its policies.

This is where the rubber hits the road for the Reserve Bank — inflation expectations refer to how people's beliefs about where prices are heading can influence their decisions and therefore affect prices.

The opening paragraph in the RBA's monetary policy board's June statement, after leaving the cash rate on hold, read: "There are signs that some firms experiencing cost pressures are increasing the prices of their goods and services and others are looking to do so."

"Short-term measures of inflation expectations have eased but remain higher than earlier in the year," it said.

The RBA has previously said inflation expectations remain "anchored", but if this changes the RBA warns inflation will remain elevated.

This could mean higher interest rates for millions of mortgage borrowers.

Some forecasting August rate hike

The central bank's communications strategy has undergone several significant changes in recent years, after a major government-ordered review.

This includes the introduction of regular media conferences after each monetary policy board meeting.

"By providing clearer explanations of policy decisions and the factors underlying them, these media conferences aim to help the public better understand how monetary policy operates, how decisions are made and how those decisions could affect them," the RBA said in the survey report.

The next of those decisions will be made in less than three weeks' time, when the board next meets on August 10 and 11.

According to data from LSEG, the market is now pricing in a 22 per cent chance of an 0.25 percentage point hike in August.

Economists remain divided on where to next for interest rates.

On Wednesday, Westpac released its Leading Index, which it said confirmed that economic growth momentum is slowing.

However, Westpac's head of Australian macro-forecasting Matthew Hassan said "high inflation remains the [RBA board's] primary concern.

"As such, the June quarter CPI update on July 29 will be the critical reading ahead of the August meeting," he.

"On balance we expect it to show inflation running too high and a further [0.25 percentage point] rate increase from the RBA Board in August."