Stephen Koukoulas
speaker
2,355 appearances
24 recordings
2 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 20 Sep
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
Now, in the last, well, 12 months or so, we've actually had, and it's crept up on us a little bit by stealth, but we've had a deterioration in our net export position.
I was only looking at this earlier last week when we were seeing that net exports, which is exports minus imports, as a contribution to bottom line GDP in the last 12 months has been minus one percentage point.
So without that, GDP would be 3.5, not 2.5.
Now, I acknowledge a lot of it's machinery and equipment to go into data centres and these sorts of things, so there could be a little bit of an offsetting downside on GDP if we took that out.
However, the numbers that we're going to be seeing later this week will probably confirm another monthly deficit on the trade in goods.
It's only going to be the third deficit in the last 10 years, and all three of those deficits have occurred in the last four months.
So...
Yeah, just a little bit of a handbrake on the economy when we tend to focus on, well, household spending, as we said, the housing sector more broadly, government demand.
Yeah, the export sector is not really helping us all that much.
Look, the move to a monthly inflation gauge, monthly inflation indicator, is a really good move because it gives you quite contemporary data
uh for what's happening to some price pressures in the economy particularly when there's a turning point up or down in the rate of inflation so for example uh we're getting the june quarter data later this week we've already got the april and may data so we've got a pretty good building block for what that june quarter result will be however
what the benefit of the June quarter data is, and this is why the RBA still prefers quite clearly getting the quarterly numbers, it overcomes some of that volatility in some of the key components.
And an obvious one in recent months has been petrol, which has been up to $2.50, down to $1.70, back up to $2.
So if you're adjusting inflation measures on the back of just petrol prices, you're getting a really big contribution or a subtraction from inflation from just the move in petrol.
So the quarterly numbers sort of smooth it out a little bit and you get a bit more of a decent read of the underlying or the trimmed mean rate of inflation using the quarterly numbers.
That doesn't say the monthly numbers are bad because they do contain information on building costs, on food and insurance and a lot of these other indicators in the first two months of each quarter.
But the quarterly data, they're the ones that are going to take the attention this week.
Well, for the headline figure, which includes everything in the CPI basket, probably a quarterly result around about 1%.
For an annual figure around about 4.3%.
So well above the RBA's target of 2.5%.
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