More bad news for those cherry-pickers peddling the "sub-trend" economic growth fiction. Westpac report today that the Australian economy continued growing at a significantly above-trend pace in April. Their more subjective "leading index" had a gloomier outlook, but, like the RBA, I prefer to focus on what is actually happening in the economy as opposed to forecasts as to what might occur in the future:
The annualised growth rate of the Coincident Index, which gives a pulse of current activity, was 4.3%, well above its long term trend of 3.1%...The level of the Coincident Index rose from 275.8 in March to 276.8 in April. Monthly components were mixed with real retail trade down 0.4%, but employment up 0.1% and the unemployment rate falling 0.2ppts to 5.0%. Updated quarterly components though were uniformly strong with industrial production up 2%, real gross non-farm product up 1.2% and real household incomes up 1.5%.
