Wesfarmers chairman Michael Chaney has forecast more rate rises are in store, and that years of inflation are ahead.

Chaney made these comments during a podcast interview with Future Generation, a social-based future fund.

“If you look at inflation for example at the moment the general view is that we’ve probably peaked, whether it’s the US, in Europe, in Australia, but that it’s going to be hard to get back down to the 2 per cent level that Federal Reserve and the Reserve Bank want to get to.

“There’s a fair bit of stickiness there, and we all know why inflation has occurred. It’s supply chain shortages exacerbated by the situation in Ukraine. And recently we’ve had the oil producers saying they’re going to put a floor under that.

“So I think it’s going to be a while until it comes down, and people generally think it’ll be 2025 until we are getting into much lower levels.”

Chaney also believes the interest rate rises will continue for a while yet.

“I think [the RBA have] been in a very difficult position and I think they’ve done a good job in dealing with it,” he said.

“They’ve used traditional methods, obviously raising interest rates if they felt they needed to, having a pause at the last meeting. But it’s always a balance between going too far with interest rates rises and sending the economy into a recession.

“So far they’ve managed to raise interest rates in a way that we still have an economy that’s growing, albeit fairly slowly.

“But I do think we’ve got a few rate raises ahead of us.”

Despite this, Chaney said that Wesfarmers were prepared for the downturn in the retail sector, which is happening “exactly the way we thought it would six months ago,” he said.

“I said to [Wesfarmers CEO] Rob Scott the other day it’s one of the few times in business where our predictions about what will happen in six to nine months have come true.

“We’re finding retail and generally the consumer side is turning down. And I think that’ll be quite difficult over the next six or 12 months.”