Wednesday, 27 March 2024

6-month annualised inflation back to target

Inflation eases further than expected

Inflation came in a little softer than expected for the year to February, at 3.4 per cent.

Excluding volatile items, the monthly inflation reading eased slightly from 4.1 per cent to 3.9 per cent over the year. 


Source: ABS

Of course, a lot of these price increases were over 6 months ago, and over the past 3 to 6 months inflation has been broadly in line with the target, as graphed by Callam Pickering of Indeed. 


Overall, these were somewhat encouraging figures.

James Foster ran through the figures in more detail here.

Tradies shortage

A potential challenge for the inflation figures going forward may prove to be the shortage of housing pushing up rents.

ABS figures released today show public sector spending on engineering construction and related infrastructure continued to soar to over $5 billion in the final quarter of 2023.

Public spending has been higher before, during the global financial crisis nation building stimulus projects...but not by much. 

This latest surge reflects some huge infrastructure and transport projects being pursued in New South Wales and Victoria in particular. 

With mining engineering construction also strong, total engineering construction work is approaching the heady peaks of the resources boomtime years. 


This is naturally good news for the Aussie economy, but is also creating a shortage of available tradies and construction workers for the building of housing, where dwelling supply targets are being consistently thwarted. 

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