UBS: Wages devastation spreads

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It ain’t pretty. From the excellent UBS team:

Wages similarly fell back by 0.6% in the two weeks to August 8, and worryingly slumped by 4.5% since the peak of the recovery on July 4. Since March 14, wages are now down by a cumulative 6.2%, which is significantly worse than payrolls, implying that average wages are declining now. Wages will likely be dragged down ahead from Q4 when the payment rate of JobKeeper is tapered.

There is no doubt that wages growth is going to fall away from the year on year 2.1% we saw in March even after the recovery into 2021. Where there is a big question is what level will wages snap back to with the recovery? Will they return to where they were before the pandemic and only grow slowly from there? Or is this a permanent step down in income and lower growth will resume from a lower base? If it is the latter then Australian households are in all sorts of trouble when the stimulus lifts.

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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.