The Australian Bureau of Statistics dropped a bomb today when officials revealed they were dropping seasonal adjustments (and ForexLive was the first to report it)
Australian employment data
Before the announcement, the consensus estimate for Australian jobs was -30K.
But economists have been quick to adjust (22 of 23 in Bloomberg’s survey have changed their estimates) and the consensus is now +15.5K with a range of +50K to 0.0K. We shared Westpac’s reasoning earlier.
If you build in the expected -80K revision and the +45.5K change to the consensus, that’s still almost 35K lost jobs.
What’s strange is that unemployment forecasts haven’t been changed from 6.1%. In fact, the latest estimates show a handful of economists lowering their unemployment forecast to 5.9%. I’m scratching my head on that one.
