Building Approvals slip but the FNQ data holds up

Today’s release of ABS Building Approvals data for June showed a surprise decline of 5% (seasonally adjusted) for a 16% increase over the year. Both houses and unit approvals fell. The less volatile Trend series showed a monthly fall of 1.1% for a year on year gain of 7.9%. Despite …read more

Fed taper continues as US growth picks up

Overnight the Fed have announced that their tapering of bond buying will continue, with another $10bn per month knocked off the plans. The Fed will now be buying just $25bn per month with the policy set to come to an end (as planned) in October. The announcement was no surprise …read more

Cost of Living follows CPI higher

The Cost of Living Indexes released this morning by the ABS are designed to answer the question “By how much would after tax money incomes need to change to allow households to purchase the same quantity of consumer goods and services that they purchased in the base period?” They consider …read more

More on SEQ v Rest of QLD jobs

Following on from our post the other day, Gene Tunny over at Queensland Economy Watch has used our Conus Trend data to compare jobs growth in SEQ (Brisbane plus the Gold and Sunshine Coasts) with the Rest of QLD. What he finds clearly shows the sharp disparity between what has been …read more

Comparing CCRC rates

Following on from our post last week, which itself was in response to an excellent piece from Loose Change, we have now had some time to take a look at the general rates being charged across the region for the 2014-15 financial year. As was highlighted in the original post, …read more

How NOT to compare rates across Councils

Loose Change has an excellent post on the flaws inherent with using misleading data to compare rates across varying Councils. As Mark points out, the protocol of comparing rate levels at a given average land valuation level makes no sense whatsoever when land valuations vary so much from Council to …read more

Inflation rate ticks higher

Data released this morning by the ABS shows that the Consumer Price Index (CPI) measure of inflation ticked up to 3% for the year to June (from +2.9% in Q1). Data for the second quarter shows that prices rose 0.5% after a 0.6% increase in Q1. While the headline data …read more

Split of jobs growth between Brisbane and the Rest of QLD

Our new Conus Trend employment data for all the QLD regions (available here) allows us to look in more detail at how jobs growth has been split between Greater Brisbane and the Rest of QLD. In the chart below we have taken the 12 month moving average of our own …read more

Cairns unemployment ticks higher but Trend is still down

Today’s release of regional labour force data from the ABS shows the unadjusted unemployment rate in Cairns ticking higher to 8.2% in June (from 5.3% in May). However, as ever, we really need to consider the Conus Trend series to make any sense of this highly volatile data. The Conus …read more

Hotels.com Chinese Intl Travel Monitor; required reading

For anyone involved in the tourism industry in Australia, and particularly in TNQ, the new edition of the Chinese International Travel Monitor from hotels.com should be required reading (it’s available for download here). There are heaps of fascinating insights into this vitally important market from both the travellers and hoteliers …read more

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