GDP double takes

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Here are some more analyses of today’s National Accounts. The pick in my view is the first by Bill Mitchell:

As winter arrived (June 1), the March quarter Australian National Accounts came out and showed that the Australian economy contracted by a staggering 1.2 per cent. With the seasons passing into spring and the warm days are back, the Australian Bureau of Statistics released the National Accounts data for the June 2011 quarter which not only revised last quarter’s result to -0.9 per cent but also showed than in the subsequent three months of this year the Australian economy grew at a robust 1.2 per cent. That means in the last 12 months the economy has grown by 1.4 per cent (a very poor result) but in the second quarter accelerated on the back on household consumption and a strange pickup in inventories. But if the growth continues then I expect some reductions in the unemployment rate by the end of the year – which is a good prospect. The irony is that the external sector continues to drag the growth rate down despite our so-called “once-in-a-hundred-years” mining boom. There are mixed signals in the economy at present though. Remember the National Accounts are a rear-vision view of what was happening in April, May and June. Since then the global economy has gone apoplectic and China is slowing. The most recent Australian data does not accord with the strength indicated in today’s (rear-vision) version of events. Read the rest here.

And here’s the banks:

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Q2 GDP

About the author
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.