Jobs
The Employment data headlines have improved in Australia the last few months. The last two months have seen 64,300 jobs created. That is the good news.
The bad news is that a majority of those jobs are due to seasonal adjustments (remember it is summer down there and not snowing like it is up here) and are not actual jobs. In fact excluding the seasonal adjustments only 18,500 jobs have been created. Of those 1,500 are full-time males. The real job creation has been in part-time jobs.
Those negative waves have pushed the unemployment rate up to 5.8%, it was 4.7% last November, and the participation rate has fallen by 0.1% since then.
|
Those discrepancies mentioned above beg the question of why bothering to seasonally adjust the data? The standard monthly error created seems excessive. The chart below shows that viewing the data from a Non-seasonally adjusted basis may be easier to spot the actual trend in employment in Australia.
|
On Wednesday we saw the Trade figures come out for Australia, Germany and the UK. We discussed this yesterday and the headline results would normally indicate optimism over global economic growth. The internals would suggest otherwise. Now the US trade figures are due and of course a deficit is expected but it'll be the internals that count. Will exports continue to move higher, and how about imports? These are October figures which is when some of us thought the economy might show some resiliency but most indicators suggested otherwise.
|
The Bank of England and the SNB meet on Thursday. Look for unchanged decisions from both at 0.5% and 0.25% respectively. Hopefully the aggressive action by the European and North American central banks over the last 2 years will be able to prevent the outcome seen in Japan that has led to ultra-low policy for the past 15 years.
|
|
