This is Fear and Greed – The Week Ahead, where Sean Aylmer and Stephen Koukoulas discuss the major events, reports and releases that provide insight into the economy this week (with a look back at the events of last week too).
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Jennifer Duke: Welcome to Fear & Greed, The Week Ahead. I’m Jennifer Duke
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Jennifer Duke: and I’m joined by economist Stephen Koukoulas. You’ll find him at thekouk.
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Jennifer Duke: com, T- H- E- K- O- U- k. com, and
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Jennifer Duke: on X using the handle TheKouk. Stephen, good morning.
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Stephen Koukoulas: And a very good morning to you, Jen. Lovely to see you.
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Jennifer Duke: Thank you very much. I listen to these all the
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Jennifer Duke: time and I’m very pleased to be speaking to you
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Jennifer Duke: in Sean’s absence.
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Stephen Koukoulas: Wonderful.
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Jennifer Duke: So, firstly, last week there was a lot of bank
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Jennifer Duke: data about. We had ANZ job ads, snap business conditions,
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Jennifer Duke: Westpac consumer sentiment, and then US CPI right at the end
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Jennifer Duke: of the week. Can you talk us through it a
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Jennifer Duke: little bit?
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Stephen Koukoulas: Yeah, it was interestingly, consumer sentiment remained gloomy. There was
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Stephen Koukoulas: no significant change in an index basis. It remains around
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Stephen Koukoulas: 80 points and remembering that the index at a hundred
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Stephen Koukoulas: is sort of where we’ve got enough optimists and pessimists
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Stephen Koukoulas: canceling each other out.
So the fact that we’re at
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Stephen Koukoulas: 80 means that we’re 20 points below neutral, so consumers
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Stephen Koukoulas: remain in glum, cost of living pressures, interest rate pressures
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Stephen Koukoulas: on their mortgage repayments, higher rents. You can see why
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Stephen Koukoulas: consumers are gloomy. And that usually feeds into softer retail
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Stephen Koukoulas: spending, which of course we’ve seen.
Business conditions, they were
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Stephen Koukoulas: quite resilient. And in fact, it wasn’t necessarily the business
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Stephen Koukoulas: conditions, business confidence type numbers, it was some of the
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Stephen Koukoulas: subsets of the data that were interesting. Prices paid, some
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Stephen Koukoulas: of the labor costs results from the survey were ticking
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Stephen Koukoulas: back up. So we’d had six or nine months where
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Stephen Koukoulas: prices paid and costs were all going down, there was
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Stephen Koukoulas: an uptick there.
So, again, one month, we don’t want to get too
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Stephen Koukoulas: excited. But nonetheless, if this is a change of trend,
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Stephen Koukoulas: then maybe we just need a bit more caution about
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Stephen Koukoulas: declaring victory over the lower inflation rate anyway.
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Jennifer Duke: That’s very interesting. Does that kind of tie into what’s
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Jennifer Duke: going on in the US do you think?
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Stephen Koukoulas: Yes, indeed. We saw the US CPI numbers last week,
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Stephen Koukoulas: late last week, and they were actually pretty much on
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Stephen Koukoulas: expectations, both core and the headline month- on- month CPI was 0.
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Stephen Koukoulas: 2%. In fact, some people who look at the second
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Stephen Koukoulas: decimal point said that they were 0.7 and 0. 16, so they were actually a
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Stephen Koukoulas: little bit below 0. 2 if you want to be
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Stephen Koukoulas: an optimist.
But basically it’s confirming the trend down in
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Stephen Koukoulas: inflation, it’s being locked in. It probably gives the Fed
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Stephen Koukoulas: pause for thought for a moment. Have they done enough?
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Stephen Koukoulas: And as we know, there are long and variable lags
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Stephen Koukoulas: in interest rate settings and their impact on the economy.
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Stephen Koukoulas: Market consensus is that the Fed’s on hold for a while
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Stephen Koukoulas: now and these inflation numbers confirm that.
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Jennifer Duke: And we’ve obviously got a bit of a big week
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Jennifer Duke: coming up. There’s some wage price index, labor force data
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Jennifer Duke: out from the ABS and also the RBA I think
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Jennifer Duke: has some minutes. What should we be expecting, do you think?
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Stephen Koukoulas: Look, the minutes from the RBA board meeting in August,
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Stephen Koukoulas: that’s the meeting they held rates steady for a second
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Stephen Koukoulas: straight month, and from what we’ve heard, it was a
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Stephen Koukoulas: line ball decision on whether they should hike or keep
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Stephen Koukoulas: them steady. So it’ll be interesting to see what weight
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Stephen Koukoulas: they’re putting on our own inflation data, what they’re seeing
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Stephen Koukoulas: in the labor market.
That wage price spiral that they
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Stephen Koukoulas: talk about, yeah, well that gets to the very point
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Stephen Koukoulas: of your next observation that we do have these wage
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Stephen Koukoulas: numbers coming out during this week, the wage price index.
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Stephen Koukoulas: Market consensus is for a rise of just under 1%
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Stephen Koukoulas: for the quarter on quarter. The annual figure approaches 4%,
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Stephen Koukoulas: just a little bit below actually. So any upside to
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Stephen Koukoulas: those wage numbers will be greeted with a bit of
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Stephen Koukoulas: concern from the RBA, I’m sure. But I suppose it
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Stephen Koukoulas: says any downside then I suppose we can kiss the
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Stephen Koukoulas: wage price spiral argument goodbye.
I think because we had
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Stephen Koukoulas: a very tight labor market for the last year or
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Stephen Koukoulas: two, which brings us to the, on Thursday we get
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Stephen Koukoulas: the labor force numbers. Employment’s been lovely and resilient. We’ve
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Stephen Koukoulas: been averaging 30, 35,000 jobs per month, getting a side of
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Stephen Koukoulas: the month- on- month volatility. That’s about the level of
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Stephen Koukoulas: the growth in the labor force, the working age population.
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Stephen Koukoulas: So that’s why the unemployment rate’s been steady at a
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Stephen Koukoulas: lovely 3. 5%.
Again, any deviation from what’s a really
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Stephen Koukoulas: good set of labor force, we tend to be a
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Stephen Koukoulas: bit gloomy about the economy as we were saying before.
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Stephen Koukoulas: One of the legacies that we’ve got now is basically
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Stephen Koukoulas: something close to full employment, and that’s got to be
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Stephen Koukoulas: a good thing. Will it continue? It seems unlikely with
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Stephen Koukoulas: the economy slowing down.
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Jennifer Duke: Fingers crossed though that we don’t have too much of
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Jennifer Duke: a hard landing. I feel like soft landing is the
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Jennifer Duke: term that we need to ditch after the next few years.
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Stephen Koukoulas: It does. And I think, look, the economy’s slowing down. It had
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Stephen Koukoulas: to. We’ve got to just put that into context. Where
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Stephen Koukoulas: we were a year ago, the economy was really strong.
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Stephen Koukoulas: As the lockdowns ended, we all came out and spent
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Stephen Koukoulas: money, we had decent savings and well, until May last
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Stephen Koukoulas: year, rates were still incredibly low, and so we had
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Stephen Koukoulas: to have a slow- down. We’re having that right now.
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Stephen Koukoulas: And the question is, what’s the trajectory for that slowing?
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Stephen Koukoulas: Is it towards that hard landing, soft landing? The (inaudible)
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Stephen Koukoulas: this week will sort of put a bit more
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Stephen Koukoulas: flesh on those bones.
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Jennifer Duke: Thank you very much, Stephen. Have a great week.
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Stephen Koukoulas: Thanks, Jen. You too.
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Jennifer Duke: That was economist Steven Koukoulas, better known as The Kouk.
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Jennifer Duke: You can find him at thekouk. com and follow him
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Jennifer Duke: on X using the handle TheKouk.
I’m Jennifer Duke, economics
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Jennifer Duke: correspondent at Capital Brief and filling in for Sean Aylmer
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Jennifer Duke: while he is on holiday. And this is Fear & Greed, The Week Ahead.