Well, wonders never cease.
Last week there was a lot of hand wringing over the weak third quarter GDP numbers and then the fall in retail sales in October.
Myer and now Harvey Norman are setting up offshore on line sites to sell back to Australia to try and enliven their weak sales.
That’s mistaken because customers are not spending because they seem to be saving more, or so the National Accounts revealed.
Now the latest job ads report from the ANZ shows a near two year high, pointing to a solid report for November when the Australian Bureau of Statistics figures are released on Thursday.
The survey showed that total job advertisements rose a seasonally adjusted 2.9% last month from October when they rose a revised 0.7% (a rise of 0.6% was originally reported).
That was the biggest monthly increase since February while total average job ads of 184,580 was the highest since December 2008, when the global and Australian economies were slowing as the GFC took hold and economies and financial systems froze.
It was also the seventh straight monthly increase and means job ads are now a very strong 33.2% higher than they were a year ago.
A 3% jump in internet ads drove the increase, again underlining how dominant online jobs advertising has become.
News ads were up 0.9% last month, but that was only up 0.9% on a year ago.
Job ads on the net were a huge 35.6% higher than November 2009.
"The improvement in job advertising suggests that the Australian economy continues to create jobs," said ANZ head of Australian economics Ivan Colhoun in yesterday’s release from the bank.
Analysts expect the official employment report due on Thursday to show a solid rise of 19,000 in employment, with the jobless rate easing to 5.2% from 5.4%.
Some economists put the number of new ads lower, around 12,000, others up to 25,000, which would put the rate closer to 5%.
And a second survey of job ads from employment consultancy Advantage showed a rise of 3.4% for November, though the pace of growth in vacancies slowed as the month progressed.
The biggest sector gainers in November were transport, engineering and legal. For the past 12 months, engineering and mining boasted the strongest growth in vacancies at 46.4% (which is understandable given the resources boom and strong spending in some areas of infrastructure).
The ANZ’s Mr Colhoun said the continued increase in internet job advertising required careful interpretation of advertising trends.
"Newspaper job advertising in Queensland, WA and South Australia appears to have been significantly impacted by a switch to the internet in the past six to nine months," he said in a statement.
"When allowance is made for this, there remains an improving trend for job advertising in these states, most notably in WA, no doubt reflecting the re-emergence of the mining boom."
The news won’t have an impact in the RBA boardroom today except to confirm the rightness of the rate rise last month.
None will appear at 2.30pm today.
