Virus cases ease
It's been a rough ride for the past week or two, as Australia has ramped up COVID-19 testing to around 65,000 tests per day, uncovering a second wave of COVID-19 centered upon Melbourne.
Sadly there have been handful of deaths of elderly patients in their 80s and 90s, but overall deaths have remained relatively few and far between in Australia.
Thankfully today's new cases numbers in Melbourne were considerably lower, after a rather alarming 428 cases were reported in Victoria yesterday.
Victoria now has 2,608 active cases of the Coronavirus.
There are 2,700 active cases in Australia, although a fair chunk of the cases across other states relate to travellers returning from overseas, and are in quarantine.
Will the HomeBuilder boost be enough?
There has reportedly been a rush of applicants into the HomeBuilder grant, which is already being reflected in higher new home prices, as tends to be the way of these things.
Source: Dr. Cameron Murray/Domain
However, given the acute challenges facing Melbourne through its long shutdown it seems likely that both the economy and the housing market will need further stimulus to be announced come the Treasurer's fiscal and economic update this week.
Victoria's auction campaigns are shifting online again, and the preliminary figures reported this weekend recorded a meagre 172 Melbourne properties as being sold under the virtual hammer, which is an abjectly weak result.
CoreLogic report's that Melbourne's home values are now down by -3.3 per cent since the first week of April, including -0.7 per cent so far this month.
There can be a lag in the data reporting, of course, but falling home values are exactly the opposite of what's going to be needed to get consumption and jobs back up and running this year.
Without extraordinary and sustained stimulus the economy is likely to experience a long, drawn out, stop-start recovery, as discussed by Justin Smirk on this week's The BIP Show, Australia's #1 ranked Business and Investing podcast.
Without extraordinary and sustained stimulus the economy is likely to experience a long, drawn out, stop-start recovery, as discussed by Justin Smirk on this week's The BIP Show, Australia's #1 ranked Business and Investing podcast.
