Is the Australian economy weakening?

Sydney’s house prices are suffering their sharpest decline in 40 years

(Image credit: © Alamy)

published 13 August 2022

“So much for the soft landing... It’s now a painful thud,” says Elizabeth Knight in The Sydney Morning Herald. Australian house prices fell by 1.3% in July, says CoreLogic. In Sydney they tumbled 2.2% for the month and are down 5.2% from their January apex: the local market is “plummeting” at its “fastest pace in 40 years”.

The cause is rising interest rates. Having started tightening monetary policy “too late”, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA), the central bank, is playing “catchup” at “warp speed”.

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Australia’s central bank hiked interest rates by 0.5% to 1.85% at the start of August. That marks “an eye-watering 175 basis points of hikes since May”, says Wayne Cole on Reuters. With “unemployment at 48-year lows” the central bank thinks the economy can take the pain.

The RBA shouldn’t be too sanguine, says Swati Pandey on Bloomberg. The household debt-to-income ratio has reached an all-time high of 187%. Higher mortgage rates will eat into household budgets while a steep downturn in the country’s A$10trn (£5.8trn) housing market would further rattle consumers.

Commodities offer cheer

While inflation is running at an annual pace of 6.1%, a 21-year high, Australia is one of the few wealthy countries that benefit when commodity prices soar. The country’s trade surplus hit a record high of A$17.7bn in June. “Earnings from metals jumped 27% in June while cereal and grains climbed 21.1%,” says Pandey. Strong demand for iron ore and coal has seen Australia enjoy trade surpluses every month since 2018.

Trade should provide a sizeable 1% boost to second-quarter GDP growth figures, says Marcel Thieliant of Capital Economics. Around three-quarters of Australian exports are “what can be broadly defined as commodities”, says Stephen Koukoulas for Yahoo Finance. The country is a major global supplier of iron ore, liquefied natural gas (LNG), coal, gold, “meat and grains”. The trouble is that this reliance leaves Australia exposed to volatile commodity markets.

Australia ranks 91st out of 133 countries in the Atlas of Economic Complexity , “just below Kenya”, says Brandon How on InnovationAus. This data, published by the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, measures “the number and complexity of the products” a country exports. Japan is top, while the UK is in tenth place. Australia’s commodity focus leaves it notably “less complex than expected for its income level”.

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Alex is an investment writer who has been contributing to MoneyWeek since 2015. He has been the magazine’s markets editor since 2019.

Alex has a passion for demystifying the often arcane world of finance for a general readership. While financial media tends to focus compulsively on the latest trend, the best opportunities can lie forgotten elsewhere.

He is especially interested in European equities – where his fluent French helps him to cover the continent’s largest bourse – and emerging markets, where his experience living in Beijing, and conversational Chinese, prove useful.

Hailing from Leeds, he studied Philosophy, Politics and Economics at the University of Oxford. He also holds a Master of Public Health from the University of Manchester.