Labour Market Fundamentally Strong The data highlight for us economists this week was not the number ten – representing days in the job for Mr Scaramucci. Instead it was yesterday’s collection of numbers showing the state of our labour market in the Household Labour Force Survey and Labour Cost Index. … Read more
Retail Spending Strong Sort Of Fresh economic data have been fairly thin on the ground this week. We learnt that core retail spending using debit and credit cards rose 1.4% in April to deliver an annualised pace of growth in the most recent three months of 5.4%. This is … Read more
Higher Inflation This morning we learnt that New Zealand’s inflation rate has lifted from 1.3% to 2.2%. Core inflation measured as non-tradeables inflation has risen to 2.5% and trimming away the top and bottom 10% of items rising and falling gives inflation at 2.2%. Excluding food and energy … Read more
Last Friday we learnt from the ANZ’s monthly business survey that like consumers businesses have become a tad less confident about the economy recently. Only a net 11% of businesses early in March felt that the economy would improve over the coming year. This is the lowest reading since … Read more
30th March 2017 Weekly Overview Bits and Pieces At the start of one of the talks I gave last week attendees were asked what they would like to hear discussed. Here are some of the things they listed. Income inequality This reflects a debate coming from two sources. … Read more
Handout For A Recent Talk I gave a presentation this week to some potential home buyers at a function in Takapuna this week and promised them that I would reprint in the Weekly Overview the 15 points I raised regarding the Auckland housing market. So here they go, in … Read more
Keep Calm and Carry On I wonder how many people are still sitting out there, holding off from buying a house, hiring staff, or undertaking capital expenditure because they expect the economy to fall into a hole in the ground because of the collapse in the dairy payout, … Read more
Strong Business Sentiment Having written quite a bit last week summarising my thoughts not too much fresh is jumping out of the grey cells this week. Suffice to say that we continue to get firm economic data being released including in the shape of our own quarterly BNZ Confidence Survey. Businesses are definitely feeling happy … Read more
A Few Reasonable Thoughts NZ dairy prices appear to be edging up. Our economy is well underpinned by a range of sectors including tourism, construction, export education, most primary exports. Investors globally are searching for yield and looking further and further afield. Given these factors is it reasonable to expect … Read more
Trying To Boost Inflation The Reserve Bank are cutting interest rates in the hope that this will stimulate people to borrow more money and spend it or to save less and spend it, and that this will cause inflationary pressures which will get the annual inflation rate back above 1%. They are failing (along … Read more