The Q4 national accounts, released in March, revealed that Australians finally emerged from their two-year recession after recording positive per capita GDP growth of 0.1%. The latest OECD Economic Outlook interim report predicts only 1.9% aggregate GDP growth in 2025 and 1.8% growth in 2026, suggesting that Australia will remain in the slow lane. As
There is no end in sight for the Chinese property bust as prices keep falling. Starts keep on falling. It’s the bad, the worse , and the ugly. Indeed, there is so far to fall given the inventory of unsold, incomplete, and holes in the ground that the downside remains epic. -17% completions are not
Australia’s labour market has shown remarkable resilience. Last week’s April labour force release from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) reported strong (89,000) employment growth, well above the consensus forecast of 22,500. Trend job growth also increased slightly, with 26,300 jobs created over the month. The unemployment rate was steady at 4.1% due to a
Uncertainty seems to be returning to risk markets if you look beyond the headline stock indices with the Moody rating cut still reverberating amid geopolitical concerns over Russia, Gaza and the impending hurt from the Trump tariffs. US sovereign debt concerns were on the mind of more than one overnight Fed speaker and while the
The SMH’s Jenna Price lamented that “Australia is in desperate need of tens of thousands of tradies over the next five years” and that “job snobbery” is worsening labour shortages: Forty years ago, experts told us the shortage of tradespeople would only be temporary. In April 1999, when thousands of roofs in Sydney were destroyed
Melbourne’s housing market has experienced the lowest value growth since the beginning of the pandemic. Between March 2020 and April 2025, Melbourne dwelling values grew by 16.2%, versus 43.3% growth across the combined capital cities. As a result, Melbourne’s median dwelling value ($781,000) is the second cheapest out of the five major capital cities, just
Risk markets in Asia are reacting with some trepidation after the Friday night cut by ratings agency Moody on US debt, with all stocks in the red with US Treasury futures also falling. This is all about the burgeoning fiscal deficit problem in the US Congress which is trying again to vote on the Trump
Gareth Aird, head of Australian economics at CBA, notes that markets have priced a 95% probability of the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) cutting the official cash rate by 0.25% at Tuesday’s monetary policy meeting. “Both the Q1 25 trimmed mean CPI and the Q1 25 wage price index printed right in line with the
Peter Cook, cross-posted from Pearls & Irritations. If ecological sustainability must be the basis for population policy, as argued by Jenny Goldie, then a vital ingredient for sustainability is water – the essence of life. If population policy requires identifying a desirable population size for Australia in the future, we must consider whether there will be enough
For a short while, anyway, Goldman. Both IMF and Elane (a Chinese shipping data company) provide vessel traffic data categorized by ship type. The IMF has developed a sophisticated algorithm to project export and import volume for major ports in China. While they generate daily series,the data is published weekly with a one-week lag. Elane