Defined Terms and Documents       

Price Stickiness in Credit Cards or Sticky or 'Stucky' means when the Overnight Cash Rate goes up or down interest rates on Credit Cards are often 'stuck' to the existing interest rate - much more so when the Overnight Cash Rate falls:

How to capture the full extent of price stickiness in credit card interest rates? - 2012 (Wollongong University) extracts include:

  • Abstract: We present a new approach to evaluate the full extent of price stickiness in credit card interest rates by modifying the existing asymmetric models so that they can be adopted for testing both the amount and adjustment asymmetries as well as the lagged dynamic inertia. Consistent with similar studies, banks behave asymmetrically in response to changes in the Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) target interest rate. Rate rises are passed onto the consumer faster than rate cuts and the credit card interest rate showed a very significant degree of downward rigidity. Based on the magnitude of the pass-through parameters obtained from short-run dynamic models, rate rises had a full one-to-one and instantaneous impact on credit card interest rates. However, in absolute terms the short-run effects of rate cuts were not only less than half of the rate rises, but also were delayed on average by three months.

  • "In the contemporary literature the asymmetric behaviour of credit card interest rates could also be referred to as “rockets-and-feathers hypothesis”. In a similar context, Bacon (1991) argued that gasoline prices “shoot up like rockets” in response to a positive rise in oil prices and “float down like feathers” in response to a fall. Hannan and Berger (1991)...."

LOAN RATE STICKINESS: THEORY AND EVIDENCE  -  RBA 1992 notes:

  • The rate on credit cards is found to be the most sticky, followed by personal loan rates, the housing loan rate and the small business overdraft rate.

  • In contrast, the rates on personal loans and credit cards do not appear to be more flexible in the deregulated period.

RBA calls out banks on 'sticky' credit card interest rates - SMH