Our Labour Force figures are out Thursday and its likely there will be an end to the growth in the labour market.
It won’t be of much import as the Reserve Bank will cut rates today, almost certainly by half a per cent.
The overnight selling wave on global markets made that certain, although the very sharp fall in the value of the Australian dollar (down around 8 US cents in a day and a bit) might generate some second thoughts.
It will be a cut that the Bank of England will match late Thursday night our time as the UK economy slowly collapses in on itself.
That won’t be of importance here; our rates will have been cut by then.
The deepening of the financial crisis in Europe over the weekend means the pressure is on the RBA to cut more deeply than it intended 10 days ago.
The Australian dollar’s fall was partly on growing expectations of an 0.50% rate cut. But that’s also a bit of headless chicken trading which doesn’t even begin to look sensible.
We are an economy in reasonable shape paying 6.5%; Europe is on 4.25% and stumbling, the US on 2% and slumping or Japan slumping and 0.5%.
Investors are selling anything remotely leveraged, and Australia is that with high rates and high levels of foreign debt.
But the irony is that the are putting their money into the most leveraged currency of all among the majors, the US dollar.
The NAB forecast Friday that it now expects rates to fall by 0.50% today, joining an early predictor in Macquarie Group’s Rory Robertson.
The NAB urged the central bank to be "more aggressive" in rate cutting.
At least the RBA has room to cut and cut deeply: the Fed in the US is almost out of room, the BGank of Japan has no room, while the ECB and the Bank of England has some leeway for some aggressive cutting, but nowhere near as much as we here in Australia (and in New Zealand where rates are already off 0.75%).
The longer the financial and credit freeze goes on, the greater the pressure on domestic economies everywhere.
Australia is exposed in that respect: we borrow heavily from offshore, especially the banks.
So does the US where those employment and other figures on the labor market last month were absolutely terrible.
Even if our unemployment rate starts rising and jobs are lost, it will take a while to reach the miserable levels the US figures are now at. And they are going to get worse as the economy slides deeper into a slowdown.
The 159,000 job loss was bad enough, but 760,000 people in the US have officially lost employment since January, with hundreds of thousands more leaving the active work force.
But millions of other workers are having their hours cut, their pay trimmed, being forced to work longer for less, or being forced to move into part time employment.
The unemployment rate of 6.1% may have been unchanged in September, with the number of unemployed persons little changed at 9.5 million.
But over the past 12 months, the number of unemployed persons has increased by 2.2 million and the unemployment rate has risen by 1.4 percentage points, according to US Government figures.
The 159,000 jobs lost in September were the most since March 2003, when the labour market was recovering after the 2001 recession.
US analysts say that government hiring has been strong throughout the downturn, as the private sector has now lost nearly a million jobs since December, when the cuts first became noticeable.
But in a portent of what’s to come as budgets worsen, state and local governments cut 18,000 jobs in the month, outside of education.
A number of US states are close to being broke and California is talking about asking the Federal Government for an emergency $US7 billion loan. Several other states are reported to be thinking along those lines, so sudden and so dramatic has been the shutdown in lending markets.
The real weakness and big signal for the future was the drop in the average hourly work week by 0.1 hour to 33.6 hours. The average hourly pay rose just 3 USc, but when combined with the shorter week, means that the average weekly paycheck actually fell by 81c to $US610.51.
That’s the bad news, the really miserable news for the US economy; at a time when consumer spending is being pressured, US consumers have less to spend on every day essentials, let alone presents and other gifts as the important holiday season approaches. That will put more pressure on employment as companies face declining sales and profits
For that reason, American economists now say the outlook is for job losses equal to or greater than last months over the next two quarters.
The combination of the shrinking payrolls and the shorter work week means that the total hours worked by all private sector employees fell for the sixth straight month.
Unemployment claims hit a 7-year high last week, but the labor force figures reveal that the number of people who settled for part-time work or had given up on finding a job altogether is the worst for 14 years.
American economists refer to it as the "under-employment rate" which includes those without jobs who have become discouraged and stopped looking for work, as well as part-time workers who want full-time jobs. It rose to 11% from 10.7%, the highest rate since April 1994.
And the number of people working part-time jobs because they couldn’t find full-time work or because their hours had been reduced jumped by 337,000 people to 6.1 million, the first time there have been more than 6 million part-time workers wanting full-time jobs since 1993.
But apart from the dislocation caused by September 11, 2001, there hasn’t been a rise in September like this since 1983.
