Sweet as
Good news for New Zealand's economy with the unemployment rate diving to 3.9 per cent, another huge drop from the preceding quarter and the lowest level in more than a decade since the quarter of June 2008.
There was also a substantial beat on average earnings versus estimates, with average earnings up by 1.4 per cent in the third quarter.
This puts the recent unemployment rate improvement for Australia to 5 per cent somewhat into the shade!
Although Australia's unemployment rate is forecast to improve over the next couple of years, sadly there's Buckley's chance of us matching this kind of performance, as tighter policy has slowed money growth dramatically.
The backward-looking indicators for construction look reasonably healthy, but the more timely indices point to a looming crunch for dwelling construction.
AIG's construction index fell 2.9 points to a contractionary reading of 46.4 in October, with commercial construction now slowing.
The house building sub-index contracted further, while the reading for apartment activity imploded another 14.6 points lower to just 29.6, the slowest level in years.
A slowdown wasn't entirely unexpected of course - indeed, I wrote a report about it 6 months ago - but despite the low cash rate there's just not enough money flowing to get the Aussie economy firing.
