Stephen Koukoulas

Yeah, that's the interesting thing.

And the short answer is yes.

Amid the gloom that we've been talking about, high inflation, rising unemployment, oh goodness, the oil price is still very high and interest rates are high.

Business capital expenditure, CapEx, is actually pretty strong.

And yes, data centres are part of the increase, but we have a shortage of hotels.

So hotel construction is being ramped up.

We've got a way that we are spending our money changing.

So warehousing investment is going up.

So rather than going to the retail bricks and mortar store, we go click, click, click, and inevitably that's distributed from a warehouse out in the sort of fringes of the cities.

And so we're seeing a lot of investment in that space going

But over and above that too, we're seeing businesses wanting to keep up with the AI boom and just technology anyway.

So machinery and equipment investments also tracking higher.

So I'm expecting that number to be reasonably positive, about a plus 2%, which is for a quarterly figure quite strong, and really locking in the trend improvement that we've seen over the last 12 months.

So CapEx is the one company

sort of beacon of light amid a sort of sea of gloom on the economy.

I think that's fair to say that we know that from the recent RBA forecasts and even the Treasury forecasts in the budget, so we've had the two big heavy hitters of the official family, RBA and the Treasury, releasing their forecasts in the last few weeks.

They are both forecasting economic growth to slow.

tick that's going to happen they're both forecasting unemployment to increase perhaps not quite as quickly to four and a half percent as we saw last week so that's happening as well and the question now and we alluded to this on the monthly cpi number is when does inflation get back to the target band and um

on even the most optimistic viewing of that.

It's not until next year.