The Australian government has cancelled the use of the word “immigration” internally, including at supposedly “independent” entities such as the RBA and PC. Now the government is wasting taxpayer dollars trying to eliminate the word from media coverage.
A nice juxtaposition comes from the US today, where democracy still exists, and the US government is discussing the economics of immigration openly. Morgan Stanley.
Immigration policy tightening and population growth slowing, payrolls can give a misleading sign about cooling in the economy.
Last week, Chicago Fed President Goolsbee addressed the employment measures and how to read them at a time when immigration and deportations are having such an effect on the labor force.
Asked “if we did [50k on payrolls], would that cause you alarm … that the labor market is weakening?
Or should we start thinking about ratios of employment?” Goolsbee answered “We saw in 2023-24, when you have uncertainty about population growth …you can get way off where you think breakeven is.”
He cited months with payrolls in the high 100k’s, when they at the Chicago Fed were imagining breakevens around 85k. “In 2023-24, that faster payroll growth wasn’t a sign of overheating” because immigration was boosting labor force growth.
“We’re in that environment now,” he said, but with the opposite effect. Slower payroll growth isn’t a sign that the labor market is freezing up.
Breakeven’s have fallen. A slower payroll pace doesn’t necessarily increase slack.
Goolsbee said “Let’s be careful about overindexing on that monthly payroll” because they’re uncertain how far they’ve fallen.
In our research, we estimate payroll breakevens falling from 210k per month last year to 130k year to date, and on track to fall to 70k at the end of this year.
President Goolsbee continued that “My intuition is … that those ratios and rates were a bit better indicator of the business cycle: the hiring rate, the layoff rate, the job opening rate, and the unemployment rate—these are sort of the four horsemen of justice” for the labor market.
This is how grownups discuss immigration and its economic effects. An increase suppresses wages. A decrease lifts wages. Der.
In Australia, the RBA and government actively censor any reference to immigration, even from their modelling, which trashes their forecasting capability. This is happening even though immigration is a much stronger input into Aussie growth than in the US.
Something very strange is happening to this country as debate across all manner of issues is being actively suppressed by the convergence of woke weirdos, Labor officials who see China, not the US, as the governance model to replicate, and a vested interest press that only cares about property prices.
