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
But that, speaking of petrol, that does include some of the petrol price increases, which really kicked off in the month of April.
They said they came off a little bit, but not that much.
For the trimmed mean, the underlying inflation rate, again, a number that's too high for the RBA's liking, probably something around 0.9 for the quarter, 3.7 annual.
And that's going to be causing the markets and the reserve banks some angst because it's that underlying inflation rate that really needs to start tilting lower towards 3, 2.75, and eventually 2.5 before we can be confident that we've sort of beaten this inflation bug.
Look, the jobs numbers certainly didn't go against a rate hike.
Now, I still think a rate hike is a very low probability, barring some almighty blowout in the inflation numbers.
But the jobs numbers last week, as you alluded to, well, the headline figure 76,000 new jobs is absolutely fantastic.
But because the ABS used a survey or a sample to measure that, and they made this quite clear because they obviously saw the results and thought, oh, my goodness, this is a strange result.
So they had a look at why they got this outsized change, which they often do when they get an odd result, a rogue result, if we can call it that.
is that they moved a whole lot of the people who they survey from Victoria to New South Wales.
That's just a quirk.
And we actually saw the unemployment rate, if we took it to two decimal points, I don't mean to torture the data here, but it actually went up.
The underemployment rate, which is the people who have a job who want to work more hours, as we explained recently in the analysis of the labour market, that is actually showing that the degree of slack in the labour market probably increased, as in there's a bit more slack in the labour market despite the 76,000 jobs that were created.
So...
It probably goes through to the keeper in a sense that the labour market is still pretty strong, but not as strong as it was, say, 12, 18 months ago when we had a sub 4% unemployment rate.
We had a sub 6% underemployment rate.
And the jobs being created were not just a one-off quirk.
They were unrelenting month in, month out.
And the hours worked part of the economy was also very strong.
That was a weaker part of the employment report last week as well.
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