We Asked How Big. The 25 Basis Points Landed on a Rate Neither Reader Named.
This morning this desk published a 50 basis point disagreement with a deadline: two readers had Bank Indonesia going 25 basis points to 6.00 per cent or 75 basis points, both up, resolving around 07:20 UTC.
Both are wrong on the headline rate, held at 5.75 per cent for a fourth straight meeting. The 25 basis points was real - it landed on the deposit facility rate, lifted from 4.75 to 5.00 per cent, an instrument neither reader mentioned, with the lending facility unchanged at 6.50. So the question we asked was how big and the question that decided it was which rate. The corridor around the policy rate was 100 basis points below and 75 above; it is now 75 and 75, symmetric for the first time in this sequence, reached by lifting the floor rather than the middle. Indonesian overnight money therefore has a floor 25 basis points higher than yesterday and a policy rate in the same place, which means a filter keyed on the policy-rate field records a non-event while a filter keyed on funding direction records a tightening, both correctly. The Reuters poll was 15 of 29 for the hold against 14 for a hike, 51.72 against 48.28 per cent - a near-tie that any vendor field reporting a single expected value destroys, and our two readers were both in the minority. Nothing we read polled the deposit facility at all. The trigger was an index provider's warning on Indonesian equity classification rather than any data, and dollar-yen traded 35.7 pips through it.