Australian Economy

Australian leading economic indicator crashes into recession

David Llewellyn-Smith
Tuesday, 5 February 2019
Advertisement

Via Damien Boey at Credit Suisse:

We have updated our proprietary activity tracker from our recent article “Positioning for RBA forecast downgrades” dated 30 January 2019. Note that the update is merely preliminary, as we do not yet have all the relevant components for a February reading. But we do have most of them:

  1. From NAB and CBA high frequency data, it appears that retail sales fell by roughly 0.3% in December.
  2. The most recent engineering data suggests that the infrastructure pipeline has thinned out some more.
  3. Credit growth is likely to remained very sluggish in January, based on leading indicators such as loan approvals.

 Flat-tracking business, consumer and homebuyer sentiment at January/December levels, the activity tracker has fallen into slightly negative territory, consistent with domestic demand contraction.

The full text of this article is available to MacroBusiness subscribers

$1 for your first month, then:
Cancel at any time through our billing provider, Stripe
Twitter Share
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.