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Friday 19 July 2019

Labour force swells

More jobseekers

New South Wales wages growth has only been running at about 2.3 to 2.4 per cent.

And that's despite a very low unemployment rate of just 4.6 per cent. 


The labour force has swelled by more than 200,000 this year as more Aussies come back in search of work.

Some 106,000 of that increase has been in New South Wales alone. 

This is great news for the Federal Budget bottom line, and we should see a Budget in surplus fairly soon. 

But it does mean that full employment is probably getting further away rather than closer.

For example, at the beginning of the year there were 666,500 unemployed persons, and now there are 711,500, for an increase of 45,000 for calendar year 2019 to date. 


So it's a mixed bag of news, and financial markets are still pricing in further easing.


Sally Auld of JP Morgan thinks we'll get two more rate cuts by 2020, with a risk that they come sooner still.