Stephen Koukoulas
speaker
2,355 appearances
24 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard yesterday
Stephen Koukoulas’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 24 in all, peaking in May 2026 with 6.
Appearances
We've got agricultural commodities that obviously feed into food manufacture.
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They're all generally up rather than down.
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They're all indicating that inflation is going to be up rather than down because the other thing to remember is that petroleum does get used not just in
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transportation, it's in plastics, it's in fertilizers, it's in a whole range of things that are feeding into the cost pressures, the inflation pressures that are around the world.
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And in a sense, that's why the oil price is still a really important inflation gauge for the global economy.
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We want to see that oil price come back lower.
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But while the tensions and the intransigence, if I can use that term, in the Middle East is still prevailing,
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that oil price is going to stay very, very high with all of the consequent inflation risks that flow from it.
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the labour force number is very important.
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And again, I'll just preface it by saying that the RBA does have the dual mandate.
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Yes, it has to meet its inflation target, 2.5%, the midpoint of the target.
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But also the other part of its mandate is to maintain full employment, in inverted commas, however that's defined.
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So each monthly labour force number gives us a little bit more of an update on whether the labour market's tight, neutral or loose.
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Suffice to say that the last couple of months, we've had a very choppy reading on jobs created or lost.
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I think we had a plus 80,000 jobs two months ago, minus 17,000 the next month.
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Now, both those figures are probably not completely accurate, but if you take an average or some sort of trend in them, you can see that monthly employment's averaging about 25,000, 30,000 per month.
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We'd like to see something like that in the numbers that come out on Thursday.
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But arguably more important is the unemployment rate.
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It is at a four and a half year high, 4.5%.
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If it ticks up to 4.6%, which, you know, is not outside the realms of possibility, then it just adds an extra complicating factor for the RBA when, you know, obviously on inflation, the rate hikes are absolute slam dunk given not negotiable.
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Showing 41–60 of 2,355 · page 3 of 118
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