Readers will recall that the great white hope for the RBA and Treasury has been a rise in non-mining business investment to drive jobs. So far it has only been modest and nowhere near enough to offset the ongoing crash in mining investment. At various times they’ve blamed “hurdle rates” and weak “animal spirits”, as well as the drover’s dog for the failure of the rebound to appear, never really addressing the core of the problem, which is that in the post-mining and post-housing boom economy (notwithstanding shrinkflation), there is too much supply of all of the wrong things.
UBS today explores the hope for more:
Is the biz capex outlook just starting to turn up?
The full text of this article is available to MacroBusiness subscribers
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.
