Calvin Davidson

So signals are a pretty strong rate of increase in that manufacturing sector.

And that's not just a one-off.

Manufacturing, that PMY has been above 50%

a few months now i think sort of you know four or five six months in a row something like that so um yeah a good result from that sector of the economy it's probably not our biggest sector but you know any any positive sign is is good uh jobs numbers pretty good we had a 0.3 increase in field jobs in november that's from stats new zealand um fifth month out of the past six where it was either flat or or rising now yeah kind of early days you know you can get revisions in these numbers they tend to be down

So that 0.3% could well be overstated, and we see it drop to 0.2 or 0.1 or whatever in the next couple of months.

But let's look at it positively.

It's still good news.

Phil Jobs, I think that's been a big part of the story in the last little while, both for the economy, for confidence, for the housing market, is that sort of weakness of the labour market.

So yeah, I guess that's a big theme for this year is can we see...

employment rise and can we see unemployment come down and so this you know could be the the sort of the start of that early days but it's you know it's got to start somewhere so so yeah i tend to look at that pretty positively i mean yes it can be downwardly revised but 0.3 is a good starting number so even if it is downwardly revised it still probably leaves you positive so um

So yeah, manufacturing jobs, pretty good.

But as you say, it kind of flows through a little bit to the inflationary side of things, which maybe isn't quite as encouraging.

So yeah, Stats New Zealand put out their selected price indices measure, which covers, it's about 45% of the benchmark quarterly CPI.

Now it does tend to cover your more volatile things as airfares and food prices, that sort of thing, energy accommodation.

It can be kind of seasonal, which they take out, of course, or take out that seasonality, but can be a bit more variable.

So I guess a wee bit of caution around it, but yeah,

yeah it's pushing up towards half the the cpi about 45 and generally the tone of these figures was was more up than down you know there was there was science through these numbers that uh inflation and uh i guess it was december um was you know just a little bit more concerning than what people might have been thinking so um yeah it just throws the cat amongst the pigeons a little bit and we've got the q4 cpi there that official benchmark number coming up this thursday now

Previous to those selected price indices numbers, which were out last week, most of the economists, bank economists, analysts have been thinking, you know, we might see inflation come down from 3% in the third quarter to 2.7, 2.6, something like that in the fourth quarter.

But now, with that latest monthly reading coming out, those expectations have shifted to the point where actually some of the numbers I've seen is that we don't get any change at all in sort of headline inflation, 3% in Q3.

the expectation is that it could be three percent in q4 as well which um yeah people people will hopefully be aware is right at the top of the target band for the for the reserve bank so um yeah not not as good as as or not as encouraging as what we might have been thinking um now yep people still anticipating a slow downwards trend there we've still got capacity in the economy you know it's been a deep recession so um this might be a bit of a one-off but um yeah it might not give much reassurance to the reserve bank i mean that you know they want to see that inflation number coming down