Experts will scour the first trickle of financial data for early clues on the state of Australia’s economy since tax relief kicked in.

The purchasing managers’ indexes for the manufacturing and services sectors land this week, as pay packets rise on cost-of-living tax breaks.

The start of the new financial year ushered in the cuts along with energy bill relief and other cost-of-living assistance expected to bolster household finances and improve the fortunes of Australian businesses.

The ‘flash’ purchasing managers’ indexes from Judo Bank and S&P Global, due on Wednesday, will capture the early impact of the cost-of-living support on the economy.

The initial insights would be valuable but it will probably take a few more weeks for the cuts and other supports to play out, Judo Bank economics adviser Warren Hogan said

“We’ll want to see how the data goes over the next couple of months,” he told AAP.

The services sector has been holding on strongly for much of 2024 and Mr Hogan expected it to expand further on the support measures.

But the manufacturing sector has been through a soft patch for the past eight months and Mr Hogan said July would be a key reading to see if conditions remained in the doldrums.

Cost pressures, namely for energy and labour, persist as a major part of the challenge facing manufacturing.

The outlook for still-elevated inflation remains a key talking point ahead of the next Reserve Bank interest rate meeting on August 5-6.

Stronger-than-expected monthly inflation readouts have pushed back expectations for cuts, but recent overseas data suggests disinflation is still under way despite a few wobbles.

Near-term interest rate cuts are back on the agenda in the United States and New Zealand, and the Bank of Canada, the European Central Bank and other European central banks have already started easing.

Australia should be expected to follow the same broad disinflation trend as its peers as it was facing broadly the same shocks as elsewhere, Westpac chief economist Luci Ellis said.

“Recent inflation data overseas has reminded market participants that sticky inflation need not imply stuck inflation,” she said.

The bank expects the RBA to stay on hold before cuts start in November.

Mr Hogan believes one or two more interest rates hikes are needed in the short term, citing “boom level” employment growth with roughly 50,000 jobs created in June.

“We’re still got a lot of demand in the economy, and the only reason it’s not showing up as GDP is because the economy is operating at capacity, so it will show up as inflation,” he said.

“And it also highlights that our productivity story continues to be hopeless because we are getting so much employment growth yet we’re getting so little GDP growth, and that’s inflationary in the short term.”

The local share market will react to a global technical outage caused by a glitch in cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike’s software.

Shares slumped on Wall Street on Friday after the far-reaching outage caused flights to be grounded and disrupted operations in banking and healthcare.

The Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 377.49 points, or 0.93 per cent, to 40,287.53, the S&P 500 lost 39.59 points, or 0.71 per cent, to 5,505 and the Nasdaq Composite dropped 144.28 points, or 0.81 per cent, to 17,726.94.

Australia’s share market had already closed for the week when reports of the outage were confirmed. The benchmark S&P/ASX200 index finished 64.9 points down at a one-week low of 7,971.6, a drop of 0.81 per cent.

The broader All Ordinaries on Friday fell 63.5 points, or 0.77 per cent, to 8,209.2.

Australian share futures were down 67 points, or 0.85 per cent, to 7876.

 

Poppy Johnston
(Australian Associated Press)

Categories: economy, Finance, RBA
Scroll to Top