Bracketus creepus
A terribly slow news day, so for something different a look at a couple of the sundry data sets.
Here's a quick yack about stamp and transfer duty take in New South Wales, with the latest statistics released via Revenue NSW.
Over the year to September 2019 there were just 196k transactions, down from 244k a year earlier.
So, firstly, annual transaction numbers are down by 20 per cent year-on-year (and down by closer to 30 per cent from the peak).
There are more people in Oz in these post-mining boom days - the Aussie population clock finally hits 25½ million this week - and many more dwellings, ad there are just the first signs now that stock turnover is finally bouncing off chronically low levels.
And, secondly, the total annual duties paid have dropped less sharply, down by 16 per cent year-on-year from $8.5 billion to $7.1 billion.
You can click to expand the chart:
A couple of follow-on observations here, then.
Firstly, due to the absurdly high transaction costs the NSW Budget is still raking it in even with housing turnover coming off 20-year lows, and this is before we even mention the other crippling taxes such as land tax, rates, and so on.
But we must always campaign for MOAR taxes, of course!
Secondly, credit growth is clearly a lagging indicator for the strength of the housing market.
Housing prices have been rising for some time in Sydney, but this can't reasonably be reflected in accelerating credit growth until transaction levels pick up (especially as so many more households are ow paying down loan principal).
In fact, housing credit growth can be a contra-indicator; it last hit record lows in June 2012 on low volumes just before the housing market picked up strongly.
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Elsewhere, iron ore prices are now reverting lower as supply from Brazil's Vale is set to come back onstream.
China's port iron ore inventories are sneaking back up to the highest levels since May (h/t the Scutt), and the higher grades of ore are getting hosed (h/t the Scutt).
Iron is no longer quite so oresome!
