The confidence fairy is back today. The Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry has released ACCI Survey of Investor Confidence and fairy dust is sprinkled everywhere in expected sales and profits:
That’s pretty impressive stuff! What is less impressive is actual conditions now and into the future. For sales and profitability we’re in the dunny:
Far more interesting, the prospects for employment are lousy despite the expected boom:
And the reason why is sensible enough, capacity is expected to be more than ample:
And to top it all off, the misses between expectations and actual are getting bigger and bigger:
There are a bevy of economists out there that will tell you that the divergence is normal at the cyclical turning point. In the past they’d have been right and perhaps this time through Christmas and Q1. But as the Government fails to fix the Budget, as capital expenditure slides away on the mining cliff, as consumers continue to save, and as jobs fail to rebound, I suspect confidence too will ebb by mid next year.
