Paul Bloxham

speaker

100 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jun 2026 last heard 3 Jun

Paul Bloxham’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jun 2026 with 1.

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FEAR & GREED | Business News · Q+A: Is Australia already sliding into an economic downturn? · 3 Jun 2026 podcast

Well, they are quite backward looking.

And I think particularly for the reasons you described already, which is that the Australian economy has faced a range of shocks since then, really.

The three interest rate rises we've seen from the RBA, only one of which really would have shown up in those numbers at all.

Of course, the Middle East conflict shock, which didn't start until the 28th of February.

And I think also we can think about the budget as having quite a large effect on things.

And that's, of course, a lot more recent.

I think, you know, these are historical numbers, really, in principle, they predate all those big sort of shocks that are hitting the Australian economy.

And to the extent that they gave us an indication of where we were at to start with, well, they were a bit weaker than expected.

So the consumer was still spending, growth was still holding up okay in consumption.

But I think there's some worrying features there where household disposable incomes are already falling in real terms.

So we're already seeing them fall.

Disposable incomes are not keeping pace with inflation, even in these numbers.

And that challenge is going to continue and probably continue to weigh on growth over the next couple of quarters.

I think another feature that was somewhat concerning is, as you say, productivity growth was really quite poor.

I mean, in the quarter it fell significantly.

GDP per hour worked.

But over the year, we're still running at this very, very sluggish 0.3% growth year on year, which is about the sort of weak pace of productivity growth that we've seen on average over the past decade.

No signs there that productivity is really improving.

So the economy is slowing down.

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