The Department of Employment’s Monthly Leading Indicator of Employment (Indicator) has fallen for the fifth consecutive month in March 2014. It is still too early to tell whether employment will continue to grow more slowly than its long-term trend rate of 1.1 per cent per annum over coming months, because the Indicator has fallen for fewer than six consecutive months. Cyclical employment has now fallen for eleven consecutive months.
This index is another aggregation of a bunch of other indexes:
ANZ job ads and Westpac consumer sentiment are reliable. But the D&B survey is useless as a forecasting tool and the Leading Index is shaky. Make of that what you will!
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal.
He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.
