Australian Economy

Via Damien Boey at Credit Suisse: We now have all the partials we can get to nowcast 2Q real GDP.

It took 300 dead Brazilians but we finally made it: The current account, seasonally adjusted, was a surplus of $5,853m in the June quarter 2019.

On 23 September, The SMH will hold a Population Summit to discuss “where key decision-makers and thought-leaders in government, transport, property, planning, banking, finance, architecture, economics and the law will come together to discuss how we successfully plan for a growing Sydney”.

The latest trade war casualty for Australia’s terms of trade is wool, via AFR: The price of wool is falling steeply as China’s textile industry feels the fallout from the trade war with the United States, and European economies weaken.

The June quarter Business Indicators report was released by the ABS, which includes aggregate wages & salaries data, namely “gross earnings before taxation and other deductions” and “includes provisions for employee entitlements”.

Can an economy grow by house prices alone?

Via Damien Boey at Credit Suisse: 2Q real GDP growth is looking like a negative print.

It’s raining poor data now.

The ABS just released its business indicators for the June quarter, which posted modest rises across most categories: In particular, inventories slumped -0.9% (from +0.7% last quarter), which will shave circa 0.5% from GDP. But company profits (+4.5%) and wages (+1.4%) were a bit stronger.

John L Hopkins – theme leader for Future Urban Mobility at Swinburne University of Technology’s Smart Cities Research Institute – has penned an article claiming that Australia’s congestion woes could be solved via flexible work arrangements: Traffic congestion is one of the most significant challenges facing our cities.

Via AIG: Employment down again.

A new survey of workers has ranked Australia’s senior executives as the worst out of 12 countries surveyed.

Bloomie today: Australia is on track to close twin deficits that were once seen as the Achilles heel of its small and open economy.

Ratings agencies don’t get much right but this report is spot on and ahead of the curve, via S&P: – After four golden decades, China faces an inescapable slowdown due to demographics, deleveraging, rebalancing, and convergence.

Farewell education super-economy, at The Age: The Andrews government was negotiating with the consortium behind plans for a $31 billion Werribee “super city” right up until the project was scrapped, the chairman claims in Supreme Court documents.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) today released data on capital expenditures (capex) for the June quarter, which registered a 0.5% seasonally adjusted fall in capex volumes over the quarter and a 1.0% decrease over the year (see below table).

The ABS has released private capex expectations for the June quarter and it met market expectations: Total capital expenditure Estimate 7 for total capital expenditure for 2018-19 is $122,119m.

National Farmers’ Federation CEO Tony Mahar says the nation’s agricultural exports could be affected by the fallout from the US-China trade war.

The Guardian’s Greg Jericho has done a good job showing the extent by which growth in Australian living standards, as measured by real per capita household disposable income, has fallen behind the OECD.

There is no science to it.

Thanks to Westpac: The ABS CAPEX survey of private business investment plans will provide some further guidance on growth prospects.