Among the economic indicators Treasurer Scott Morrison needs to keep an eye on, the US labour market should be toward to the top of the list.
As the US Federal Reserve begins to gradually edge up its funds rate, Chair Janet Yellen has indicated the tightness of America’s market for workers will be an important factor in shaping the central bank’s thinking on how quickly to proceed with tightening monetary policy.
The state of the US labour market matters because as it gets tighter, so the bargaining power of workers is likely to increase and wages rise, helping force inflation up.
The higher inflation goes, the more the Federal Reserve will feel compelled to raise interest rates.
This matters for Australia because the higher official US interest rates rise, the greater the downward pressure on the Australian dollar (though this relationship should not be overstated).
As the Australian economy tries to establish sources of growth outside the boom-and-bust resources sector, a lower dollar helps by making exports and locally-made goods and services more competitive.
In the past year, the $A-$US exchange rate has slipped down more than 10 cents to 71.2 cents, a far cry from the above-parity levels reached earlier this decade, when massive mining investment was sucking in huge amounts of capital.
Given that the US unemployment rate has already dipped to 5 per cent, it might come as a surprise that the Federal Reserve has only just begun to increase interest rates.
But behind the headline number, data shows that many of the jobs created in the last few years have been casual or part-time. This suggests that there is considerably more slack in the labour market than a 5 per cent unemployment rate would ordinarily imply.
Recent soft income growth underlines the point. In the year to September, US wages grew by 3.66 per cent, virtually half the long-term average of 6.33 per cent.
This is being reflected in consumer spending – US retail sales grew by a modest 1.7 per cent in the year to November.
The Federal Reserve held off embarking on a tightening cycle until it was confident that the US recovery from the global financial crisis was well-established, so its decision earlier this week to raise interest rates, even by a meagre amount, is seen as a vote of confidence in the world’s largest economy.
As he contemplates the sea of red in the Commonwealth’s financial accounts, Scott Morrison can only hope that this is the case.
Despite his bizarre denialism on the matter, the Federal Government does indeed have a revenue problem. Collapsing commodity prices and soft income and corporate tax collections account for a lot of the deterioration in the Budget position.
And the government’s own forecasts suggest there is not going to be a quick turnaround. Earlier predictions that the economy would expand by 2.75 per cent this year have now been pared back to 2.5 per cent, and next year it is expected to grow by 2.75 per cent rather than 3.25 per cent.
Estimates of business investment, household spending, the terms of trade and private final demand have all been downgraded.
As Reserve Bank of Australia Governor Glenn Stevens observed last month, a rebalancing in the sources of growth is underway, but it is a little rockier than might have been hoped for.
With the economy poised between the drag caused by tumbling resources investment and support coming from a nascent recovery in non-mining activity – particularly services – now would seem a bad time to be adding to the weight on activity by cutting into government spending.
To his credit, Morrison has so far eschewed the sort of bloodletting Joe Hockey pursued in his first Budget.
But the cuts he has outlined – crackdowns on welfare ‘rorts’ and the axing and reduction of bulk billing incentives for pathology and diagnostic imaging services, in particular – make little economic sense.
Both sets of measures, collectively worth more than $2 billion, will mean consumers have less money to spend.
As the country’s experience through the GFC has shown, this is significant. Arguably the most effective measure taken by the Federal Government when the GFC hit in late 2008 was to deposit money directly into the bank accounts of millions.
While much of this money was saved, enough was spent to keep shop tills ticking over, shielding thousands of retail and services sector jobs.
This was especially the case among lower-income households, where a higher proportion of income has to be spent rather than saved.
The bulk of Morrison’s cuts will fall on just such households.
At a time when retailers and service providers are trying to find their feet after several years of lacklustre conditions, this is hardly helpful.
Such unhelpful tinkering by governments all too common.
Economists often lament that government interference prevents an economy’s ‘automatic stabilisers’ (floating currency, swings in tax collections and welfare payments) from working effectively, making a difficult situation far worse.
But it is totally unrealistic to expect governments in such situations to do nothing – after all, they have usually been elected on a platform to ‘do something’.
As Ross Gittens suggests, they could do much worse than to devote their energies into devising a path to surplus that kicks in once a recovery is established, and to work out how to better handle future prosperity.
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