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 the hours worked is slowing at a faster pace than the slowing in employment, which is a signal that businesses are saying, yeah, we don't want to.
And this is another really important thing.
Businesses don't want to sack their staff, for example, in the slowdown for a couple of reasons.
One in case it's just a temporary blip, slower.
and they've laid off their staff and it's very hard to rehire.
And two, it is very expensive and difficult to rehire if you let staff go because you think the business is slowing down and then you find in two months later there's actually just a little bit of a lull in your business and you need to hire them back.
It's very, very hard and very expensive to do.
So there's this retained labour, labour hoarding they call it, from some employers who –
It's one of the last things they do.
They'll try to keep their staff.
They'll cut their hours.
And then finally, they'll actually reduce their workforce, which is how unemployment goes up.
Yes, it's that inflation link that you just touched on there.
We want a strong labour market.
One of the basic tenets of economics is that we want everybody who wants a job to have a job.
Full employment is a worthy objective, but you can have too much of a good thing.
if you've got over full employment, that the economy is so strong.
And we had this a couple of years ago when unemployment was at 3.5%, that there was just no skilled workers available for businesses.
So how they coped with their business strategy was actually bumping up wages to hire the talent they need for their business.
And when they bump up their wages to maintain their margins, they have to put up their selling prices, which is inflation.
Showing 1041–1060 of 2,355 · page 53 of 118
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