Australian Economy

The knee breakers are prospering.

From Deloitte today: 29 January 2019: Global growth is still sprinting, but it is increasingly showing signs of starting to run out of puff.

Hoocoodanode?

Via The Australian: Scott Morrison and Finance Minister Mathias Cormann have refused to back Defence Minister Christopher Pyne’s claim that a Shorten government would plunge Australia into recession.

Via Chanticleer today: In the final six months of the year, as a violent correction shook global markets and the ASX 200 fell 5.4 per cent, many of Australia’s retail REITs took off.

With Judith Sloan making perfect sense and no sense at all: By the time I was driving home, a series of rolling brownouts (a cute term for electricity being cut off in whole suburbs) was under way.

PM Scummo begins his re-election pitch today with a speech based upon fantasy: Labor said we would fail, but we nailed it – 1.1 million jobs within five years and we are now past 1.2 million jobs.

Which is of course an absurd proposition.

By Leith van Onselen Yesterday’s ABS labour force release for December revealed a softening Australian youth labour market – i.e.

By Leith van Onselen CBA has released its flash PMI and it signals more Australian economic weakness: The rate of expansion in business activity slowed to the weakest in the 33-month survey history during January as softer service sector growth outweighed a pick-up in the rate of expansion at manufacturing firms.

By Leith van Onselen As summarised earlier, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) today released its labour force report for December, which registered a reasonable 21,600 increase in total employment and a small fall in the headline unemployment rate to 5.0%, driven by a 0.1% fall in labour force participation.

Just in from The ABS: DECEMBER KEY POINTS TREND ESTIMATES Employment increased 23,100 to 12,711,600.

By Leith van Onselen The Maritime Union of Australia’s national secretary Paddy Crumlin says Labor is likely to pursue coastal shipping reforms if it wins the 2019 federal election.

By Leith van Onselen A few weeks back, Houses & Holes asked “What kind of fiscal stimulus should Treasury be readying?”: It is highly doubtful that Recessionberg will go for anything so crude as cash dumps though Labor probably will in H2.

By Leith van Onselen The news surrounding Australia’s retail sector continues to disappoint with NAB’s Cashless Retail Sales Index for December coming in as “fairly weak”: The NAB Cashless Retail Sales Index rose 0.9% in December on a month-on-month basis, up from a 0.4% (revised) increase in November.

By Leith van Onselen After being badly exposed by the royal commission for failing to stand up to the financial sector, it has been revealed that Australia’s regulators have commissioners and staff to accept secret gifts from the industries they regulate.

By Leith van Onselen John Menadue has asked the pertinent question of why the Australian Government continues to ban so-called ‘grey’ imports of second-hand cars when there is no longer an industry to protect?

By Leith van Onselen The Victorian Government has called for a review of entry requirements into Australian universities after growing evidence has emerged that foreign students with poor English language proficiency are badly eroding education standards and placing undue strain on lecturers and university staff.

By Leith van Onselen As the Australian economy ended 2018, it became clear that the Aussie jobs market has begun to lose momentum.

By Leith van Onselen Last week it was Soul Patterson’s CEO, Todd Barlow.