Australian Economy

By Leith van Onselen I wrote on Wednesday how both sides of politics plan to sell Victoria’s last major state-owned asset – the Port of Melbourne – in order to fund infrastructure to support Melbourne’s rapidly growing economy.

The AIG Performance of Construction Index is out and  has failed to complete a hat-trick with the PMI and PSI: The national construction industry contracted at a steeper rate in February as activity returned to negative territory for the first time in five months, after a sharper fall in new orders.

So the reserved and mild-mannered American Canadian law Professor James Allan, who works at an under performing Australian university, has recently written a long tirade against the bureaucratisation of higher education in Australia.

By Leith van Onselen The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has released trade data for the month of January, with Australia recording a seasonally-adjusted trade surplus of $1,433 million.

A decent theory for the blowout number in retail sales from the SMH blog: Retail spending may have jumped sharply in January, but economists warn it is too early to say if the good times are back for retailers.

By Leith van Onselen The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has just released retail sales figures for the month of January, which registered a 1.2% seasonally-adjusted increase in sales over the month, which met economist’s expectations.

By Leith van Onselen Of all the expenditure cuts by the Federal Government, cutting employment in the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) has to be among the most reckless.

Education is Australia’s only real non-mining export industry of the future (as a subset of tourism), but that hasn’t helped it survive Budget rigors in the past few years and the cost is showing.

By Leith van Onselen Following on from yesterday’s national accounts release by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), I have once again benchmarked Australia’s economic recovery since the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) against the recessions of the 1970s, 1980s and the 1990s.

The RBA’s John Edwards reckons: “There’s a debate about whether the place is picking up or tipping into a very serious downturn, and this certainly argues against the serious downturn point of view,” he said.

These people have no shame.

From Bloxo today comes another happy take: Today’s GDP numbers were positive. They showed that growth has picked up and that Australia’s great rebalancing act is underway. GDP rose by +0.8% in Q4 to be +2.8% higher y-o-y (market had +2.5%).

This seems to me to be a solid take from Stephen Walters at JP Morgan on today’s GDP figures: Australia’s economy expanded 0.8%q/q last quarter, slightly firmer than expectations, and a welcome improvement on the previous quarter’s sluggish gain of 0.6%.

By Leith van Onselen As summarised by Houses & Holes earlier, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) today released the national accounts for the December quarter, which registered a 0.8% increase in real GDP over the quarter and a 2.8% rise over the year.

Via the SMH blog: UBS interest rate strategist Matthew Johnson: GDP was a bit better than what the RBA and the market were expecting but not really good enough to bring rate hikes into focus.

Here come the bulls: There seems to be at least a little irony in there.

The AIG Performance of Services (PSI) is out this morning and will give the cyclically-focused more to crow about: The latest seasonally adjusted Australian Industry Group Australian Performance of Services Index (Australian PSI®) jumped by 5.8 points to 55.2 points in February.

It appears MB has finally beaten some sense into Ross Gittins: When people hear news reports about redundancies at this factory and that, many conclude we must be heading for recession.

By Leith van Onselen Roy Morgan Research (RMR) last night released its unemployment estimate for the month of February, which registered a large jump in the unemployment rate to 12.3% from 11.3% in January (see next chart).