By Leith van Onselen The REINZ has released its house price data for November, which revealed a 1.3% seasonally adjusted increase in the national median house price, with prices up 7.1% year-on-year: Outside of Auckland, seasonally adjusted house prices rose by 0.1% in November, with prices up 7.9% year-on-year. Looking at the major cities, Auckland’s
By Leith van Onselen For years, ‘Big Australia’ booster, the Grattan Institute, has called for Australia’s supposedly underutilised middle-ring suburbs to be bulldozed for apartments and townhouses in order to house the many millions of extra migrants projected to inundate our cities over coming decades. This transformation into a dense urban form is to be
By Leith van Onselen In the wake of the massive cost blow-outs and delays hitting both the Parramatta Light Rail Project and the Eastern Suburbs Light Rail Project, the NSW Auditor-General has lambasted the 2.7 kilometre light rail line in Newcastle, whose cost blew-out by 44% to $368 million and was built with a “not convincing” business
By Leith van Onselen Of all the statements arising from Wednesday’s COAG pro-Big Australia love-in, the most idiotic has to be reserved for Victorian Premier, Dan Andrews. From The AFR: Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews reaffirmed his push for a large migrant intake but hinted the federal government had to do more for his state regarding
By Leith van Onselen In the week ended 13 December 2018, the CoreLogic 5-city daily dwelling price index, which covers the five major capital city markets, tanked another 0.35%: Values fell across all major markets except Adelaide: So far in December, dwelling values have fallen by 0.63%, driven by heavy losses across Sydney, Melbourne and
By Leith van Onselen The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released its National Financial Accounts for the September quarter, which revealed a 1.8% quarterly decline in Australian banks’ gross external liabilities (offshore borrowings), but a large 7.6% increase over the year. One Name Paper (-$24 billion) and Deposits (-$10 billion) drove the quarterly decline
Global Macro / Markets / Investing: Paul Volcker on Why Financial Regulation and Good Governance Are So Important – Barron’s Cash back in the spotlight as global bond yields fall – FT After the ’death cross,’ the S&P 500 seems to be forming another scary chart pattern – CNBC Central banks should not set economic
By Leith van Onselen The ABS today released its National Health Survey for 2017-18, which revealed that rates of obesity continue to rise, with two-thirds (67.0%) of Australian adults classified as either overweight or obese, up from 56.2% in 1995: However, the data above is based on the highly flawed “Body Mass Index” (BMI), which is
By Leith van Onselen This is hilarious. There’s now a satirical spoof account on Twitter mocking “DrDemography“, Liz Allen. It’s called “Professor Demography” and purports to be an “environmentalist” living in Sydney’s wealthy and insulated Rose Bay: Professor Demography believes that Peter McDonald is being far too conservative and that Australia should lift its migrant
By Leith van Onselen The HIA has jumped aboard Peter McDonald’s immigration propaganda releasing the following drivel lobbying against any immigration cut: Sensible heads need to prevail regarding Australia’s immigration policy said the Housing Industry Association, following COAG’s determination yesterday to make population planning and management a standing item on their agenda. “Australia needs to
By Leith van Onselen ABC 7.30 Report last night aired the final of a three part special on Australia’s budding housing bust, which is well worth watching. The episode focussed on Labor’s policy to restrict negative gearing to newly constructed dwellings and to halve the capital gains tax discount. The segment featured several commentators warning
By Leith van Onselen Last weekend, CoreLogic released its preliminary auction clearance rates, which revealed the following results: Today, CoreLogic has released its final auction results, which reported a large 4.3% decline in the national auction clearance rate to 41.0%, with Sydney’s auction clearance rate diving 6.8% to 41.3% and Melbourne’s falling 2.3% to just
By Leith van Onselen Fairfax’s Ross Gittins yesterday penned an excellent article lamenting the neoliberal obsession with privatisation, which is unambiguously making Australians worse-off: Many people feared that if private businesses were allowed to buy government businesses, the first thing they’d do would be to jack up their prices. Politicians and supposed experts told them
By Leith van Onselen The Centre for Future Work at the Australia Institute has released a new report showing the proportion of workers in the private sector that are covered by enterprise agreement has fallen from 19% in 2013 to 12% in 2017. It also shows that the number of private-sector employees who are covered by
By Leith van Onselen The Australian’s Judith Sloan has comprehensively demolished the business lobby’s latest “deeply misleading and self-serving” policy paper claiming “Migration works for all of us”. According to Sloan, the business lobby’s motivation is obvious: more migrants results in an increased labour supply, which in turn can put downward pressure on wages and
By Leith van Onselen The Teranet-National Bank House Price Index for November has been released, which shows that even though Canadian house prices fell in November, annual growth continues to bounce back from August’s post-Global Financial Crisis (GFC) low: Home values nationally declined by 0.3% in the month of November, driven by a 0.6% fall
By Leith van Onselen The Sydney housing bust is on, with dwelling values falling the most in 30-years, according to CoreLogic. From The SMH: Average Sydney home values have fallen 10.1 per cent since their 2017 peak, CoreLogic’s head of research Tim Lawless said on Tuesday, citing data as of December 7. That surpasses the
By Leith van Onselen Professor Peter McDonald’s immigration propaganda swept yesterday’s COAG meeting on managing Australia’s population growth. From The New Daily: Officials at the talks in Adelaide claim that population expert Professor Peter McDonald “exploded” Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s calls for a cut to immigration… “I don’t think the Prime Minister should cut migration,” Professor
By Leith van Onselen With the release yesterday of the ABS’ lending finance data for October, it’s an opportune time to once again chart how capital city house prices are tracking against both investor and total housing finance. As readers no doubt already know, housing finance has historically been strongly correlated with values. Therefore, it
By Leith van Onselen On Tuesday, the ABS has released the September quarter property data showing the total number of dwellings in each state. Although this series only dates back to September 2011, it is arguably the best data to use when assessing actual dwelling supply, since unlike the ABS’ various quarterly housing construction data
Global Macro / Markets / Investing: Yellen warns of another potential financial crisis: ’Gigantic holes in the system’ – CNBC Market Volatility Leads to Fresh Focus on Machinery Beneath Trading – WSJ Electric Cars, Solar Panels & Clean Energy Storage – Tesla Investors Bet $10 Billion Against Popular Bond ETFs – WSJ IMF warns storm
By Leith van Onselen Today’s Lending Finance data for October, released by the ABS, revealed that personal and renovation finance continues to collapse. Personal finance commitments were down 8.2% over the year, are down 25% since the March 2013 peak, and are tracking at the lowest level since December 2002: In a similar vein, renovation
By Leith van Onselen In recent times, a veritable conga-line of groups, representing a huge cross-section of society, have called for the federal government to lift Australia’s pathetically low Newstart Allowance for the unemployed (aka ‘Dole’), including: Deloitte Access Economics senior partner Chris Richardson; the Business Council of Australia; Former Treasury Secretary, Ken Henry; Professor
By Leith van Onselen As auction clearance rates have crashed to 2011 lows: We are now starting to see apologists claim that auction clearances no longer matter and are now an unreliable indicator for dwelling prices. Here’s Domain’s Kate Burke: About one third of Sydney properties that fail to sell under the hammer at auction are snapped
By Leith van Onselen Australia’s speculator frenzy continues to unwind abruptly, according to today’s Lending Finance data for October, released by the ABS. As shown below, the annual value of investor loans in New South Wales (read Sydney) is falling fast, as is Victoria (read Melbourne). Investor loans in the other major jurisdictions are also in
By Leith van Onselen Back in 2016, BIS Shrapnel (now BIS Oxford Economics) released possibly the worst ever piece of economic “modelling” for a “confidential client” forecasting impending doom if negative gearing is limited to new dwellings, as proposed by Labor. This farcical modelling was lambasted by numerous economists and Media Watch, and led to calls
By Leith van Onselen ABC 7.30 Report last night aired the second of a three part special on Australia’s budding housing bust, which is well worth watching. The episode focussed on how the credit crackdown is putting heat on buyers and developers. The episode first features several quotes about systemic mortgage fraud and loose lending:
By Leith van Onselen The Labor state governments will reportedly use the Morrison Government’s new found concerns about excessive immigration as an opportunity to demand greater funding from the federal government at the upcoming COAG meeting. From The New Daily: The Prime Minister asked for it. And Scott Morrison is going to get it from Labor
By Leith van Onselen Labor may not have sufficient support in the Senate for its proposal to abolish cash refunds for excess dividend imputation credits if it wins the 2019 federal election. Labor would require the support of the Greens and four crossbenchers to pass the reforms before the current Senate is dissolved on 30
By Leith van Onselen The Master Rent-Seekers Builders Association (MBA) is in full panic mode after a few builder collapses and has demanded governments take immediate policy action to bail-out the industry, including stamp duty exemptions for first home buyers and first home buyers grants. From The ABC: OAS Group, based in Beverley in Adelaide’s
