Trade deficits don't have to be wicked, unless you believe Trump

By MILLIE MUROI, Economics Writer

While the US president-elect would have you believe a trade deficit is a wicked thing, it’s not a hard and fast rule. In fact, it can actually be good. We’ve become used to the word “deficit” being synonymous with “bad” (think about how many governments highlight when they’ve got a “budget deficit” – not a lot!). But deficits don’t have to be bad.

Since late 2016, Australia has had a run of trade surpluses, meaning the value of all the goods and services we export has been bigger than the value of all those we import. That doesn’t make us any better than countries like the US which have run a trade deficit every year since the 1970s.

Generally, countries are better off when they’re importing things other countries can make more efficiently and cheaply. For Australia, that includes cars, electronics and pharmaceuticals. If we tried to make more of these things ourselves, just to improve our trade balance, we’d be wasting resources we could use to tinker away at other things we’re better at making.

We can always buy, more cheaply, the things we’re worse at making – unless of course we’re trumped by tariffs (which, note to Trump, almost always leaves both countries worse off).

A “current account” deficit is not a bad thing either. Australia had one for more than 40 years, until September 2019. The current account records how much is flowing in and out of Australia when it comes to the value of goods, services and income.

We learnt last week that in the latest September quarter, for instance, the value of our exports ($156 billion) minus the value of our imports ($153 billion) gave us a trade surplus for the quarter of about $3 billion. And the value of interest and dividend payments we were paid by foreigners ($28 billion) minus what we paid them in interest and dividends ($45 billion) gave us a “net income deficit” of about $17 billion.

Combining the net income deficit and the trade surplus leaves us with a deficit on the current account in the September quarter of about $14 billion.

It’s one of the two big parts of what’s called the “balance of payments”: a map of Australia’s economic transactions with the rest of the world.

The balance of payments records the flow of money from everything including exports and imports of goods, services and financial assets (such as shares and bonds) – even transfer payments like foreign aid. Basically: payments to foreigners and payments from foreigners.

Of course, by “Australia’s transactions” we mean those made by Australian residents. Loosely, this means people who live here, businesses operating here, and our governments, which all do deals with the rest of the world.

Now, back to the current account. Why has Australia recorded so many current account deficits?

Historically, we’ve tended to import more than we export, and we’ve paid more in dividends and interest to foreign owners and lenders than they have to us for our foreign shareholdings and loans.

Whenever we import, or pay income (such as dividends) out to people in other countries, it’s recorded as a “debit” in our current account and an equal “credit” in what’s known as the “capital and financial account” – which we’ll come back to. When we export, or receive income from overseas, it’s a “credit” in our current account and an equal “debit” in the other account.

Because of this, the two accounts are, in theory, meant to balance out (because of measurement issues, they usually don’t). When the debits exceed the credits, an account is in deficit. When the credits exceed the debits, it’s in surplus.

The main reason we’ve run so many current account deficits through the years is that we’ve tended to have a heap of investment opportunities (more than we could hope to finance with our own savings).

The inflow of foreign capital meant we were able to grow our economy, paying out dividends and interest to foreign investors for their help. Now, where do we record all this investment?

Enter the capital and financial account. The financial account takes up the lion’s share of the combined bucket. It records any transactions involving assets and liabilities changing hands. This includes things like direct investment (long-term capital investment such as buying machinery or when an investor owns 10 per cent or more of a company through shares), and portfolio investment (smaller purchases of shares in a business, or bonds).

When we sell foreigners shares in an Aussie business, borrow from them or sell them some real estate, that’s a credit in the capital account. When they sell us shares or land or lend us money, that’s recorded as a debit.

The much smaller capital account, meanwhile, captures transactions where nothing tangible is received in return: things such as debt that has been forgiven, foreign aid to build roads, or transactions involving intangible assets (such as trademarks or brand names) or rights to use land.

For some time in the past decade, we briefly went into a current account surplus and a financial and capital account deficit. This was partly thanks to rapid industrialisation in China which turbocharged our exports of minerals, energy, education and tourism (remember: credit in the current account, debit in the financial and capital account), but also our increased tendency to save and cut down our local investment spending on new housing, business equipment and public infrastructure. At the same time, the proportion of our savings going into superannuation, which invests partly into shares of foreign companies, had grown.

Recently, we’ve switched back to running a current account deficit. Is this bad? Not necessarily. It’s partly due to a continued fall in commodity prices such as iron ore and coal, for which demand has weakened, which is bad news for our exporters. But we’re also paying more income to non-residents (remember: this is mostly because they’ve been investing or lending to us, usually to help us grow by helping to finance our investment spending).

But the current account deficit is also thanks to factors such as a rise in service imports. We’ve been travelling more, meaning our spending overseas has increased. A bad sign? Hardly.

So, while we have a current account deficit, that doesn’t automatically mean we’re doing badly. Deficits can help us grow and surpluses don’t always leave us better off. Trump should be careful playing his cards.

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We're investing more overseas than foreigners are investing here

 For pretty much all of Australia’s modern history, our strategy for getting more prosperous was to be a “net importer of [investment] capital” from the rest of the world. But four years ago, that was turned on its head, and we became a net exporter of investment capital.

If you think that doesn’t sound like a good thing, I agree with you – though probably not for the same reason as you. I think it does much to explain why the economy – and the productivity of our labour – have grown so weakly over the past decade. And are likely to continue growing slowly once the Reserve Bank has beaten inflation out of our system.

How come you haven’t heard about this historic turnaround? Because, though economists hate to admit it, economics is subject to fashions, and for many years they haven’t been much interested in talking about what’s happening in the economy’s “external sector”, which accounts for about a quarter of the whole economy.

All of Australia’s households’, businesses’ and governments’ economic dealings with the rest of the world during a period are summarised in a document called the “balance of payments” – payments to foreigners and payments from foreigners.

The balance of payments is divided into two accounts, the “current” account and the “capital and financial” account.

The current account shows the value of our exports of goods and services ($171 billion in the latest, March quarter) less the value of our imports of goods and services ($129 billion), to give us a trade surplus for the quarter of $42 billion.

But then it takes account of our interest and dividend payments to foreigners of $57 billion, less their payments of interest and dividends to us of $24 billion, to give us a “net income deficit” of $33 billion.

Subtracting this deficit from the trade surplus of $42 billion leaves us with a surplus on the current account for the quarter of $9 billion.

So, we ended up making a profit during the quarter, as we have in every quarter for the past four years, whereas for almost every year before that we ran deficits. We’ve made some progress.

Is that what you think? Sorry, as the father of economics, Adam Smith – born 300 years ago this year – spent his life explaining, this “mercantilist” notion that a country gets rich by trying to export more than it imports is wrong.

We benefit from importing the things that other countries do better than we do, and they benefit from us exporting to them the things we do better than they do. Economists call this the “mutual gains from trade”.

In any case, like the accounts of every business, the balance of payments is based on “double-entry bookkeeping”, where every transaction is seen as having two, equal sides, a debit and a credit. So, it’s wrong to think that debits are bad and credits are good.

Similarly, it’s wrong to think that the resulting deficits (debits exceed the credits) are bad, and surpluses (credits exceed the debits) are good.

And remember that the “current” account is only one half of the balance of payments so, since the debits and credits are always equal, if we’re running a surplus on the current account, we must be running a deficit of equal size on the other, capital and financial account.

Until four years ago, we always ran a surplus on the capital account, but now we’re running a deficit. But what does this switch actually mean?

It means that, until recently, our households, businesses and governments always spent more on investment – in new housing, new business equipment and structures, and new public infrastructure – than they could finance from their own savings.

(Households save when they don’t spend all their income on consumption. Businesses save when they don’t pay out all their after-tax profits in dividends. Governments save when they raise more in taxes than they spend on their day-to-day activities.)

How can we, as a nation, spend more on new physical investment than we’re able to finance with our own saving? By getting the extra savings we need from abroad. We can borrow it, or we can allow foreigners to own Australian businesses or real estate.

And that’s exactly what we did until four years ago. We borrowed overseas and let foreigners own “equity” in our economy. This is what it means to say Australia was a “net importer of capital”.

Why did we do that? Because we had more opportunities for economic development than we could finance from our own saving, and figured that allowing foreigners to join us in investing in our economy would leave us better off.

The consequence was that, for more than 200 years, our economy grew faster and our standard of living improved faster than if we’d kept everything to ourselves.

So, what’s changed? Why have we switched to being a net exporter of investment capital? Why have we begun investing more of our savings in other countries than they’ve been investing in Oz?

Partly because the build-up of our compulsory superannuation system means we, as a nation, are saving a lot more of our income than we used to.

Now here’s the killer: but also because, particularly since the end of the mining investment boom a decade ago, we’ve been investing a lot less in improving and expanding our businesses.

You wonder why, until the government and the Reserve Bank mistakenly caused the present brief inflationary surge, the economy’s growth was so weak? Now you know.

You wonder why the productivity of our labour’s been improving so slowly? Because we haven’t had enough business investment in new and better machines. Or in research and development, for that matter.

And the main thing we’ve got to show for this deterioration is a current account surplus. You beaut.

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Economy close to stalling, as Reserve hits the brakes yet again

It’s been a puzzling week, as we learnt the economy had slowed almost to stalling speed, just a day after the Reserve Bank raised interest rates for the 12th time, and warned there may be more.

According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ “national accounts”, real gross domestic product – the economy’s production of goods and services – grew by just 0.2 per cent over the three months to the end of March.

That took growth over the year to March down to 2.3 per cent, which sounds better than it is because the economy has slowed so rapidly. If it continued growing by 0.2 per cent a quarter, that would be annual growth of 0.8 per cent.

And the resumption of immigration means the population is now growing faster than the economy. Allow for population growth and GDP per person actually fell by 0.2 per cent. Over the year to March, it grew by only 0.3 per cent.

While a growing population is good for businesses – they have more potential customers – to everyone else, economic growth has been sold to us as raising our material standard of living. Not much chance of that if GDP per person is falling.

The Reserve Bank has been trying to slow the economy down because demand for goods and services has been growing faster than the economy’s ability to supply them, thus allowing businesses to increase their prices.

With additional help from the rising prices of imported goods and services, the rate of inflation has shot up. It’s started falling back from its peak of 7.8 per cent at the end of last year, but is still way above the Reserve’s 2 per cent to 3 per cent target range.

The Reserve’s been raising the interest rates paid by the third of households with mortgages, to reduce their ability to spend on other things. But, at this stage, probably the biggest dampener on consumer spending is coming from the failure of wages to keep up with rising prices.

“Demand” means spending, so if households find it harder to spend on goods and services, that makes it harder for businesses to raise their prices, thus bringing the inflation rate back down.

And remember that the full effect of all the interest rate rises we’ve seen is still to be felt. The pain will increase over the rest of this year.

But if I were Reserve Bank governor Dr Philip Lowe, I wouldn’t be too worried that the plan wasn’t working. The biggest single factor driving GDP is consumer spending, which accounts for more than half of all spending. In the June quarter last year, it grew by 2.2 per cent.

The following quarter its growth fell to 0.8 per cent, then 0.3 per cent, and now 0.2 per cent. Wow. I think the squeeze is working.

Although more people have been working more hours, real household disposable income fell by 0.3 per cent in the quarter, and by 4 per cent over the year to March.

It was hit by the failure of wages to rise in line with prices, by the doubling in households’ interest payments, and by the bigger bite that income tax took out of pay rises, caused by bracket creep.

How did households manage to keep their consumption spending growing despite their falling real income? By cutting the proportion of their income that they were saving from more than 11 per cent in March quarter last year to less than 4 per cent this March quarter – the lowest it’s been in about 15 years.

Household investment spending on newly built homes and alterations fell by 1.2 per cent, its sixth fall in seven quarters.

One bright spot was growth in business spending during the quarter of 2.9 per cent, led by spending on machinery and equipment, and non-dwelling construction – particularly on renewables and electricity infrastructure.

Unfortunately, much of the machinery investment was on imported equipment that had been delayed by the pandemic, so it’s not a sign of continuing strength. The volume of spending on imports was a super-strong 3.2 per cent, but imports subtract from GDP, of course.

Treasurer Jim Chalmers always blames the economy’s slowdown on higher interest rates (blame the Reserve, not me), high inflation (not me either) and “a slowing global economy” (blame the rest of the world).

A slowing global economy? Yes, of course. Everyone’s heard about that. Trouble is, the main way the rest of the world affects us is by buying – or not buying – our exports. And the volume of our exports grew by 1.8 per cent in the March quarter, and 10.8 per cent over the year to March. That’s because our miners have done so well (and our fossil-fuel-using households and businesses so badly) out of the higher world coal and gas prices caused by the Ukraine war.

Even so, this quarter’s growth in export volumes of 1.8 per cent has been swamped by the 3.2 per cent growth in import volumes, meaning that “net exports” – exports minus imports – subtracted 0.2 percentage points from the overall growth in real GDP during the quarter.

After Lowe’s decision on Tuesday to raise rates yet again, Chalmers wasn’t mincing his words. “I do expect that there will be a lot of Australians who find this decision difficult to understand and difficult to cop – ordinary working Australians are already bearing the brunt of these interest rate rises, they shouldn’t bear the blame too,” he said.

“The Reserve Bank’s job is to quash inflation without crashing the economy, and they will have a lot of time and opportunities to explain and defend the decision that they’ve taken today.”

Lowe has said repeatedly that he’s seeking the “narrow path” where “inflation returns to target within a reasonable timeframe, while the economy continues to grow, and we hold on to as many of the gains in the labour market [our return to full employment] as we can”.

After seeing the next day’s GDP figures, Paul Bloxham of HSBC bank observed that the narrow path “is looking extremely narrow indeed”. True.

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Now the hard part for the RBA: when to stop braking

In economics, almost everything that happens has both an upside and a downside. The bad news this week is that the economy’s growth is slowing rapidly. The good news – particularly for people with mortgages and people hoping to keep their job for the next year or two – is that the slowdown is happening by design, as the Reserve Bank struggles to slow inflation, and this sign that its efforts are working may lead it to go easier on its intended further rises in interest rates.

But though it’s now clear the economy has begun a sharp slowdown, what’s not yet clear is whether the slowdown will keep going until it turns into a recession, with sharply rising unemployment.

As the Commonwealth Bank’s Gareth Aird has said, since the Reserve Bank board’s meeting early last month, when it suddenly signalled more rate rises to come, all the numbers we’ve seen – on economic growth, wages, employment, unemployment and the consumer price index – have all come in weaker than the money market was expecting.

What’s more, he says, only part of the Reserve’s 3.25 percentage-point rate increase so far had hit the cash flow of households with mortgages by the end of last year.

“There is a key risk now that the Reserve Bank will continue to tighten policy into an economy that is already showing sufficient signs of softening,” Aird said.

That’s no certainty, just a big risk of overdoing it. So while everyone’s making the Reserve’s governor, Dr Philip Lowe, Public Enemy No. 1, let me say that the strongest emotion I have about him is: I’m glad it’s you having to make the call, not me.

Don’t let all the jargon, statistics and mathematical models fool you. At times like this, managing the economy involves highly subjective judgments – having a good “feel” for what’s actually happening in the economy and about to happen. And it always helps to be lucky.

This week, the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ “national accounts” for the three months to the end of December showed real gross domestic product – the economy’s production of goods and services – growing by 0.5 per cent during the quarter, and by 2.7 per cent over the calendar year.

If you think 2.7 per cent doesn’t sound too bad, you’re right. But look at the run of quarterly growth: 0.9 per cent in the June quarter of last year, then 0.7 per cent, and now 0.5 per cent. See any pattern?

Let’s take a closer look at what produced that 0.5 per cent. For a start, the public sector’s spending on consumption (mainly the wage costs of public sector workers) and capital works made a negative contribution to real GDP growth during the quarter, thanks to a fall in spending on new infrastructure.

Home building activity fell by 0.9 per cent because a fall in renovations more than countered a rise in new home building.

Business investment spending fell by 1.4 per cent, pulled down by reduced non-residential construction and engineering construction. A slower rate of growth in business inventories subtracted 0.5 percentage points from overall growth in GDP.

So, what was left to make a positive contribution to growth in the quarter? Well, the volume (quantity) of our exports contributed 0.2 percentage points. Mining was up and so were our “exports” of services to visiting tourists and overseas students.

But get this: a 4.3 per cent fall in the volume of our imports of goods and services made a positive contribution to overall growth of 0.9 percentage points.

Huh? That’s because our imports make a negative contribution to GDP, since we didn’t make them. (And, in case you’ve forgotten, two negatives make a positive – a negative contribution was reduced.)

So, the amazing news is that the main thing causing the economy to grow in the December quarter was a big fall in imports – which is just what you’d expect to see in an economy in which spending was slowing.

I’ve left the most important to last: what happened to consumer spending by the nation’s 10 million-odd households? It’s the most important because it accounts for about half of total spending, because it’s consumer spending that the Reserve Bank most wants to slow – and also because the economy exists to serve the needs of people, almost all of whom live in households.

So, what happened? Consumer spending grew by a super-weak 0.3 per cent, despite growing by 1 per cent in the previous quarter. But what happened to households and their income that prompted them to slow their spending to a trickle?

Household disposable income – which is income from wages and all other sources, less interest paid and income tax paid by households – fell 0.7 per cent, despite a solid 2.1 per cent increase in wage income – which reflected pay rises, higher employment, higher hours worked, bonuses and retention payments.

But that was more than countered by higher income tax payments (as wages rose, with some workers pushed into higher tax brackets) and, of course, higher interest payments.

All that’s before you allow for inflation. Real household disposable income fell by 2.4 per cent in the quarter – the fifth consecutive quarterly decline.

That’s mainly because consumer prices have been rising a lot faster than wages. So, falling real wages are a big reason real household disposable income has been falling, not just rising interest rates.

Real disposable income has now fallen by 5.4 per cent since its peak in September quarter, 2021.

But hang on. If real income fell in the latest quarter, how were households able to increase their consumption spending, even by as little as 0.3 per cent? They cut the proportion of household income they saved rather than spent from 7.1 per cent to an unusually low 4.5 per cent.

If I were running the Reserve, I wouldn’t be too worried about strong consumer spending stopping inflation from coming down.

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Weak starting point for next year’s threats to the economy

It’s clear the economy’s started slowing, with the strong bounceback from the lockdowns nearing its end. That’s before we’ve felt much drag from the big rise in interest rates. Or the bigger economies pulling us lower, which is in store for next year.

To be sure, the economy’s closer to full employment than we’ve been half a century. But limiting the decline from here on will be a tricky task for Anthony Albanese and, more particularly, Reserve Bank governor Philip Lowe.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ “national accounts” for the three months to the end of September, published this week, showed real gross domestic product – the nation’s total production of goods and services – growing by just 0.6 per cent during the quarter, and by 5.9 per cent over the year to September.

Focus on the 0.6 per cent, not the 5.9 per cent – it’s ancient history. Most of it comes from huge growth of 3.8 per cent in the December quarter of last year, which was the biggest part of the bounceback following the end of the second lockdown of NSW, the ACT and Victoria.

Since then, we’ve had quarterly growth of 0.4 per cent, 0.9 per cent and now 0.6 per cent. That’s the slowing. Quarterly growth of 0.6 per cent equals annualised growth of about 2.5 per cent. That’s about the speed the economy was growing at before the pandemic, which we knew was on the weak side.

Dig deeper into the figures, and you see more evidence of slowing. Strong spending by consumers was pretty much the only thing keeping the economy expanding last quarter. Consumption grew by a seemingly healthy 1.1 per cent, which accounted for all the growth in GDP overall of 0.6 per cent. The various other potential contributors to growth – business investment spending, new home building, exports and so forth – cancelled each other out.

But get this: that growth of 1.1 per cent was half what it was in the previous quarter. And what were the main categories of strong spending by consumers? Spending in hotels, cafes and restaurants was up by 5.5 per cent in the quarter.

Spending on “transport services” – mainly domestic and overseas travel – was up almost 14 per cent. And purchase of cars was up 10 per cent.

Anything strike you about that list? It’s consumers still catching up after the end of the lockdowns, when most people were still earning income, but were prevented from spending it. We couldn’t go out to hotels, cafes and restaurants, interstate travel was restricted, and overseas holidays were verboten.

As for buying a new car, an earlier global shortage of silicon chips and container shipping mean few were coming into the country.

Get it? Much of the strong consumer spending that kept the economy moving last quarter was driven by life getting back to normal after the lockdowns and the easing of pandemic-caused supply shortages. It’s a temporary catch-up, that won’t continue for long.

Now let’s look at what the quarterly accounts tell us about the state of households’ finances. Despite their strong consumer spending, their real disposable income actually fell a fraction during the quarter, taking the total fall over the year to September to 2.6 per cent.

Why did households’ income fall? Because prices rose faster than wages did. How did households increase their spending while their income was falling? By cutting the proportion of their incomes they’d been saving rather than spending.

After the first lockdown in 2020, the household saving rate leapt to more than 19 per cent of disposable income. Why? Because people had lots of income they simply couldn’t spend.

But the rate of saving has fallen sharply since then. And in the September quarter it fell from 8.3 per cent of income to 6.9 per cent – almost back to where it was before the pandemic.

As Callam Pickering, of the Indeed jobs site, explains, “households have been relying on their savings, accrued during the pandemic, to maintain their spending in recent quarters”. Lately, however, they’ve “been hit from all angles, with high inflation, falling [house] prices and mortgage repayments all weighing heavily on household budgets”.

“As household saving continues to ease, the ability of households to absorb the impact of higher prices and rising interest rates will also diminish,” he says.

By the end of September, the hit from higher interest rates was just getting started. Of the 3 percentage-point increase in the official interest rate we know has happened, only 0.75 percentage points had yet reached home borrowers.

So, the hit to growth from government monetary policy is only starting. As for the other policy arm, fiscal policy, we know from the October budget it won’t be helping push the economy along. And in the September quarter, falling spending on infrastructure caused total public sector spending to subtract a little from overall growth in GDP.

A similar subtraction came from net exports. Although the volume of exports rose by 2.7 per cent during the quarter, the volume of imports rose by more – 3.9 per cent. A big part of this net subtraction came from the reopening of our international borders. Our earnings from incoming travellers rose by 18.6 per cent, whereas the cost of our own overseas travel jumped by 58 per cent.

Finally, self-righteous business people are always telling us that if we want to real wages to rise rather than fall, there’s an obvious answer: we’ll have to raise our productivity.

Sorry, not so simple, preacher-man. The accounts show that real labour costs to employers per unit of output fell by 2.6 per cent over the year to September.

Meaning that after allowing for the productivity improvement the nation’s employers gained, the increase in wages and other labour costs were a lot less than the increase in the prices they charged.

This suggests business profits are much better placed to weather next year’s hard times than their workers’ and customers’ pockets are. Not a good omen.

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The plague hasn’t wounded the economy, but the boom won’t last

The pandemic has caused much pain – physical, financial and psychological – to many people. But what it hasn’t done is any lasting damage to the economy and its ability to support people wanting to earn a living.

That’s clear from this week’s “national accounts” for the three months to the end of December, with the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealing the economy’s production of goods and services – real gross domestic product – rebounding by 3.4 per cent, following the previous quarter’s contraction of 1.9 per cent, caused by the lockdowns in NSW, Victoria and the ACT.

Despite those downs and ups, the economy ended up growing by 4.2 per cent over the course of last year. It was a similar story the previous year, 2020, when despite the nationwide lockdown causing the economy to contract by a massive 6.8 per cent in the June quarter, it began bouncing back the following quarter.

Over the two years of the pandemic, the economy’s ended up 3.4 per cent bigger than it was before the trouble started.

Be under no illusion, however. The economy would not have been able to bounce back so strongly had the federal government not spent such huge sums topping up the incomes of workers and businesses with the JobKeeper wage subsidy, the temporary increase in JobSeeker benefits, special tax breaks for business (including to encourage them to invest in plant and equipment) special incentives for new home-building, and much else. The state governments also spent a lot.

The Reserve Bank also cut interest rates – from next-to-nothing to nothing – and bought a lot of government bonds, but I find it hard to believe this made a big difference, except to house prices and home building.

It’s true that these figures for GDP and its components don’t include the effects of the Omicron wave, which came mainly in the first half of January. But by now it’s pretty clear its effect on the economy was fairly small. Of course, we may not be finished with the Greek alphabet.

None of this is to deny that the pandemic has done lasting damage to some individual workers, businesses and industries. Overall, however, the economy’s in surprisingly good shape. And this is confirmed by turning from the national accounts to the jobs market.

We have 270,000 more people in jobs than we did before the pandemic, and both unemployment and underemployment are at 13-year lows, while the number of job vacancies is at a record high.

This remarkable achievement is partly the consequence of shortages of young, less-skilled workers, caused by our closed border, however. Those shortages will gradually go away now the border’s been reopened.

Unsurprisingly, the detailed figures show that most of the growth during the quarter came from a rebound in the two unlocked states, NSW and Victoria, plus the ACT.

More surprisingly, most of the growth came from a rebound in consumer spending in former lockdown area, which rose by 9.6 per cent, compared with 1.6 per cent in the rest of the country.

The only other positive contribution to growth in the quarter was a rise in the level of business inventories – meaning the rest of the economy was holding it back.

Spending on new housing and alterations fell by 2.2 per cent in the quarter, mainly because of temporary shortages of workers and materials.

The government’s stimulus program has ended, but the industry still has many new houses in the pipeline. However, Thursday’s news of a 28 per cent collapse in the number of new residential building approvals in January makes you wonder how long the housing industry will keep contributing to growth.

Business investment in new equipment and construction also fell during the quarter. Businesses say they’re expecting to increase their spending significantly this year but, as Kieran Davies, of Coolabah Capital, has noted, “companies find it hard to forecast their own investment expenditure”. And the government’s tax incentives won’t last forever.

The jump in consumer spending came despite a fall in households’ disposable income, caused by a decline in assistance from government. Thus, to cover the increased spending, households had to cut their rate of saving during the quarter from almost 20 per cent of their disposable income to 13.6 per cent.

What’s been happening is that households save a huge proportion of their income during lockdowns (because they can’t get out of the house to spend it), but cut their rate of saving when the lockdown ends and spend much more than usual as they catch up on things and services they’ve been waiting to buy.

Even so, a saving rate of 13.6 per cent is about twice the normal rate - meaning households still have a lot of money stashed in bank accounts – more than $200 billion – that they’ll be able to spend in coming months.

Most of this is money they’ve earnt in the normal way, but much of it is also money that’s come to them in special assistance from the government.

It’s mainly because of all this extra money waiting to be spent that the Reserve Bank is forecasting that, after contracting by about 1 per cent in 2020 and growing by 4 per cent in 2021, the economy will grow by a bit more than 4 per cent this year.

Remember, however, that the economy usually grows by only about 2.5 per cent a year. So what looks like booming growth last year and this, is really just catch-up from the temporary effects of lockdowns.

We simply can’t – and won’t – keep growing at the rate of 4 per cent a year. That’s why the Reserve is expecting growth to slow sharply to a more-normal 2 per cent next year, 2023.

Most of the extra money households are holding may have been spent by the end of this year. And the forecast for 2023 assumes we’ll be back to wages growing a bit faster than the cost of living – which has yet to happen.

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The new normal: much more reliance on government spending

What this week’s budget proves is that fiscal (budgetary) stimulus really works, something many economists had come to doubt over the four decades in which monetary policy – the manipulation of interest rates – was the main instrument used to manage the economy’s path through the business cycle.

That potency’s the main reason the economy has rebounded from last year’s government-ordered deep recession far earlier and more strongly than any economist (or I) had expected.

It’s now clear that, by the March quarter of this year, the economy’s production of goods and services – real gross domestic product – had returned to its level at the end of 2019. The level of employment was a fraction higher than before the virus struck, and the rate of unemployment had gone most of the way back to its pre-virus 5.1 per cent.

And it was Scott Morrison’s massive boost to government spending – JobKeeper, the temporary JobSeeker supplement and all the rest – “wot done it”.

This week’s budget, coming on top of last year’s, confirms there’s been a lasting shift in the main policy instrument used by the macro economy managers, from monetary policy to fiscal policy.

Why? Short answer: because when the official interest rate – the lever monetary policy uses to encourage or discourage borrowing and spending – has fallen almost to zero, your instrument no longer works.

We, and all the advanced economies, are caught in what the great British economist John Maynard Keynes called a “liquidity trap”: there’s plenty of money around to be borrowed – and at very low interest rates – but few businesses want to take it. Cutting rates even further won’t change this.

The last time the developed world was caught in a liquidity trap was the Great Depression of the 1930s. Keynes immortalised himself by thinking outside the box and coming up with the solution: give up on interest rates and switch to using fiscal policy – government spending and taxation – to keep the economy growing until the private sector – businesses and households – get their mojo back.

Note that we were caught in our liquidity trap long before the virus came along. The pandemic’s just brought matters to a head. The problem the economic managers are responding to is “structural” – deep-seated and long-lasting – not “cyclical”: temporary.

So don’t imagine the switch from using interest rates to using the budget is temporary. It will continue for as long as very low interest rates keep monetary policy impotent. And for as long as the rich countries’ bigger problem remains unemployment, not inflation.

Low inflation and low interest rates go together. That’s why the Reserve Bank’s being cautious rather than brave in assuring us it’s unlikely to increase interest rates “until 2024 at the earliest”.

But why is fiscal stimulus more effective than economists realised? Why does a dollar of stimulus have a bigger effect on GDP – a higher “multiplier effect” – than they thought? Two main reasons.

One thing that reduces the size of fiscal multipliers is the “leakage” of spending into imports. But this doesn’t matter as much in a more globalised world, when all the rich economies are likely to be stimulating at the same time. As they did in the global financial crisis of 2008 and are doing now in response to the pandemic. My country’s leakage of spending becomes your country’s “injection” of exports – and vice versa.

A second factor that was keeping multipliers low is what economists call the “monetary policy reaction function”. If a government is spending big – whether for political or economic reasons – but the independent central bank thinks this will risk inflation going above its target, it will increase rates.

The two arms of macro policy will then be pulling in opposite directions. This is what we had before the arrival of the pandemic, when the Reserve was cutting interest rates to get the economy moving, but Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg were focused on eliminating debt and deficit.

Now, however, fiscal policy and monetary policy are both pushing in the direction of encouraging growth and lower unemployment. With fiscal doing most of the pushing, this means a higher multiplier.

Which brings us to the obvious question: is the “stance of policy” adopted in this week’s budget expansionary or contractionary? If you believed all the silly talk of a “big-spending budget” you’d be in no doubt that it’s expansionary.

But it’s trickier than that. If you judge it the simple way the Reserve Bank does, by looking at the direction and size of the expected change in the budget balance from the present financial year to the coming year, you find the budget deficit’s expected to fall from $161 billion to $107 billion.

That’s a huge $54 billion fall, suggesting the budget is contractionary. But that’s not right. Because last year’s budget underestimated the speed with which employment and tax collections would rebound and people would get a job and go off the dole, the additional stimulus measures announced in the budget stopped that fall from being a lot bigger.

And remember this: a lot of last year’s stimulus spending – something less than $100 billion-worth - won’t have left the government’s coffers by June 30 this year. And it’s been estimated that about $240 billion-worth of stimulus spending that did leave the government’s accounts is still sitting in the accounts of households and businesses, able to be spent in the coming year.

We do know, for instance, that the saving rate of households, which was 5 per cent before the coronacession began, was still up at 12 per cent of their disposable income, after peaking at 22 per cent at the end of June last year.

The government’s forecasters are expecting that a lot of the savings of households and companies will be spent on consumption and investment in 2021-22. This tells me it would be a mistake not to think of fiscal policy as still highly expansionary. Which is as it should be.

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Coronacession: great initial rebound, but recovery yet to come

If you’re not careful, you could get the impression from this week’s national accounts that, after huge budgetary stimulus, the economy is recovering strongly and, at this rate, it won’t be long before our troubles are behind us.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics issued figures on Wednesday showing that the economy – real gross domestic product – grew by 3.1 per cent over just the last three months of 2020. This followed growth of 3.4 per cent in the September quarter.

When you remember that, before the virus arrived, the economy’s average rate of growth was only a bit more than 2 per cent a year, that makes it look as though the economy’s taken off like a stimulus-fuelled rocket.

Even the weather is helping. The drought has broken and we’ve had a big wheat harvest. We keep hearing about the Chinese blocking some of our exports, but much less about them going back to paying top dollar for our iron ore. This represents a massive transfer of income from China to our mining companies and the federal and West Australian governments.

So much so that our “terms of trade” – the prices we get for our exports compared with the prices we pay for our imports – improved by 4.7 per cent in the December quarter, and by 7.4 per cent over the year.

Sorry. It certainly is good, but it's not as good as it looks. The trick is that you can’t judge what’s happening as though this is just another recession. It’s called the coronacession because it’s unique – sui generis; one of a kind.

Normal recessions happen because the economy overheats and the central bank hits the interest-rate brakes to slow things down. But it overdoes it, so households and businesses get frightened and go back into their shell. The fear and gloom feed on each other and unemployment shoots up. (If you’ve heard of poets’ license, economists have a licence to mangle metaphors.)

This time, the economy was chugging along slowly, with the Reserve Bank using low interest rates to try to speed things up, when a pandemic arrived. Some people were so worried they stopped going to restaurants and pubs. But to stop the virus spreading, the government ordered many businesses to close and the whole nation to stay at home.

(To translate this into econospeak: normal recessions are caused by “deficient demand”; this one was caused by “deficient supply” - on government orders.)

Knowing this would cause much loss and hardship, governments spent huge sums to support individuals and firms, including the JobKeeper wage subsidy (intended to discourage idle firms from sacking their workers), the temporary JobSeeker supplement (to help those workers who were sacked), help business cash flows and much else.

The politicians and their econocrats assured us this would be sufficient to hold most of the economy intact until they’d be able to lift the lockdown. Despite much scepticism (including from me), this week’s figures offer further proof they were right.

The national lockdown was imposed in March, and caused GDP to contract by a previously unimaginable 7 per cent in just the June quarter. The national lockdown was lifted early in the September quarter, when most of that 7 per cent should have returned.

If it had, it would have been easier to see what it was: not the start of a “recovery”, but just the rebound when businesses are allowed to reopen and consumers to go out and shop.

But the need of our second biggest state, Victoria, to impose a second lockdown – which wasn’t lifted until November - has seen the rebound spread over two quarters, with a bit more to come in the present, March quarter.

When you study the figures, you see that most of the collapse in growth and rebound in the following two quarters is explained by just the thing you’d expect: the downs and ups in consumer spending. It dived by 12.3 per cent in the June quarter, then rebounded by 7.9 per cent in the following quarter and a further 4.3 per cent in the latest quarter.

Consumer spending grew strongly in the December quarter, even though the wind-back of federal support measures caused household disposable income to fall by 3.1 per cent. How could this be? It was possible because households cut their outsized rate of saving.

At the end of 2019, households were saving only 5 per cent of their disposable income. By the end of June, however, they were saving a massive 22 per cent. But by the end of last year this had fallen back to 12 per cent. This suggests people were saving less because they were worried about their future employment and more because they just couldn’t get out to shop.

Note that, by the end of December, the level of real GDP was still 1.1 per cent below what it was a year earlier. Economists figure we’ve rebounded to about 85 per cent of where we were. But what happens when, after the present quarter or next, we’re back to 100 per cent?

Will we keep growing at the rate of 3 per cent a quarter? Hardly. The easy part – the rebound – will be over, most of the budgetary stimulus will have been spent, and it will be back to the economy growing for all the usual reasons it grows.

Will it be back to growing at the 10-year average rate of 2.1 per cent a year recorded before the virus interrupted? If so, we’ll still have high unemployment – and no reason to fear rising inflation or higher interest rates.

But it’s hard to be sure we’ll be growing even that fast. On the Morrison government’s present intentions, there’ll be no more stimulus, little growth in the population, a weak world economy, an uncompetitive exchange rate thanks to our high export prices and, worst of all, yet more years of weak real growth in income from wages. The “recovery” could take an eternity.

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The Liberal Keynes moves back into Treasury

For a man who, just months ago, was too prudish to say that dirty word “stimulus”, there’s now no doubt Treasurer Josh Frydenberg has become a card-carrying Keynesian. This week’s budget administers a huge Keynesian boost to our recessed economy. But he’s done it in a very Liberal way.

And, although the budget papers prefer to say “support” rather than “stimulus”, the man himself is always tossing off Keynesian jargon such as “aggregate demand” and burbling about the budget’s “automatic stabilisers”.

(John Maynard Keynes, BTW, was an avowed supporter of the British Liberal Party – although it was a different animal to our party of that name.)

According to the budget papers, the budget announced a further $73 billion in stimulus (plus $25 billion in virus-related health measures) over the next four years, on top of earlier spending of $159 billion.

Another way of judging the budget’s effect on aggregate (total) demand in the economy is to say the government expects the underlying cash deficit to increase from $85 billion last financial year to $213 billion this year.

This increase of $128 billion is equivalent to more than 6 per cent of gross domestic product. Unlike a strict Keynesian analysis, however, this takes the stimulus’ addition to the “structural component” of the budget balance, arising from the government’s explicit decisions to increase government spending or cut taxes, and combines it with the addition to the “cyclical component” made by the operation of the budget’s automatic stabilisers.

As the budget papers explain, “automatic stabilisers are features of the tax and transfer system that dampen the size of economic cycles without the need for explicit actions by policymakers. The government has allowed the automatic stabilisers to operate freely to dampen the effect of the COVID-19 shock.

“In a downturn, household and business after-tax income falls by less than before-tax income (for instance, due to progressivity in the tax system and [provisions for companies to deduct their losses from future - and now past – profits for tax purposes]) and transfer payments increase (due to increases in unemployment benefit payments and income-testing of other transfer payments).

“This provides an economic stimulus [whoops] that can reduce the magnitude of the downturn,” the papers say.

But Frydenberg wants to be clear that he’s embraced Keynesianism on his own terms. The budget papers say the economic recovery plan “is consistent with the government’s core values of lower taxes and containing the size of government, guaranteeing the provision of essential services, and ensuring budget and balance sheet discipline”.

And, as Frydenberg has said many times, the goal is to use budgetary stimulus to bring about a “business-led recovery”. I’d have thought that spending a lot of public money makes it a government-led recovery, but I think what he means is that most of the public money should be given to businesses, rather than being spent directly or given to punters.

Once you realise this, Frydenberg’s choices of what measures to include in the budget are easier to understand.

For instance, by far the most expensive measure – costing $27 billion over four years – is a temporary concession allowing businesses to deduct the full cost of all the new equipment they buy in the first year, rather than apportion the cost over the life of the asset.

Next are the personal income-tax cuts, costing $18 billion over the budget year and the three years of the “forward estimates”.

Then there’s infrastructure grants to the states of $7 billion, plus $2 billion for road safety improvements and upgrades. Then the $5 billion cost of letting loss-making businesses get an immediate tax deduction for their loss.

Only now do we get to the budget’s other centrepiece beside the tax cuts, the JobMaker hiring credit (wage subsidy) for employers who hire jobless young people under 35, which is the government’s replacement for the $101 billion JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme when it finishes in March. The new scheme will cost just $4 billion over three years.

Then we come to the cash splash payments to pensioners ($2.6 billion), $2 billion in new spending on aged care and $2 billion on a research and development tax incentive.

You see from this incomplete list how many of the budget’s measures seek to direct money into the hands of businesses: $34 billion in tax breaks and $4 billion in wage subsidies, compared with $20 billion in personal tax cuts and the pensioner cash splash.

Most of these measures are intended to get businesses investing and employing, but they do so by cutting the cost to them of capital equipment or labour. Those who would have invested and employed anyway are left better off, without taxpayers getting any value.

(And remember that one reason the government was happy to pay what it thought would be $130 billion for the JobKeeper scheme was that the money went to workers via their employer. This left businesses better off to the extent that their workers kept working.)

You do have to wonder whether all this spending would have done more to get the economy moving and unemployment falling if more of it had gone on job subsidies and less on investment incentives. Trying to get businesses investing in expanding their production rather than trying to get more people in jobs and spending on the things businesses produce seems to get things the wrong way round.

And you see that this “Liberal values” business-directed, tax-reducing approach to fiscal stimulus explains why the budget didn’t include the two measures economists most wanted to see because they’d do most to boost consumer spending and jobs: a big spend on social housing (a no-no under the rules of Smaller Government) and a permanent increase in unemployment benefits (almost every cent of which would have been spent).

The risk with Frydenberg’s politically correct stimulus is that too much of it will be saved. He needs to bone up on Keynes’ warning about the “paradox of thrift”.

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It'll be a long haul to get the economy going properly

If you’ve been away on Mars for the past five months, it will have been a huge surprise to learn this week that the economy is now "officially" in recession. For the rest of us, the news is the size of the recession, how it compares, what contributed most to the contraction, and the cloudy outlook for recovery.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics’ "national accounts" show real gross domestic product fell by 7 per cent in the June quarter, on top of the 0.3 per cent fall in the previous quarter. This is by far the largest fall in any quarter since we began measuring quarterly GDP in 1959.

The next biggest was a fall of 2 per cent in the June quarter of 1974. As Callam Pickering, of the Indeed global job website, reminds us, our total fall since December compares with peak-to-trough falls of 1.4 per cent in our previous recession in the early 1990s, and 3.7 per cent in the recession of the early 1980s.

So, no doubt this is indeed the worst recession since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Why so bad? Because, as David Bassanese of BetaShares tells us, "this is a recession like no other," being caused by the almost instantaneous spread around the world of a deadly virus and the consequences of our efforts to suppress the virus by ceasing much economic activity.

This coronacession is distinguished by its very front-loaded and cruelly uneven nature. “Unlike past recessions, which usually evolve over a year or so, most of the contraction in the economy took place within two short months,” Bassanese says.

The sudden need to lock down much of the economy and get people to leave their homes as little as possible raises the hope that, as the economy is re-opened, much of that activity will be resumed. And if we switch the focus from what’s happening to GDP – the economy’s production of goods and services – to the more important issue of what’s happening to jobs, we see this is already happening.

Treasurer Josh Frydenberg reminds us that, of the 1.3 million people who either lost their job or were stood down on zero hours following the outbreak, more than half were back at work by July.

This suggests we should be able to expect a significant bounce-back in production in the present September quarter, which has less than a month to run. Sorry, Victoria’s second wave and return to lockdown have put paid to that fond hope.

With the rest of the nation re-opening, but Victoria accounting for about a quarter of GDP, the optimists in Treasury are hoping for a line-ball result, but most business economists seem to be expecting a further (though much smaller) fall.

With any luck, however, Victoria should have started re-re-opening by the end of this month. So, a big recovery in production in the run up to Christmas? Sorry. Unless the government changes its tune by then, the economy will be struggling to cope with the withdrawal of much of Scott Morrison’s budgetary support.

Time for some good news. Remember that, no matter how tough things are looking in Oz, they’re looking better than in the rest of the developed world, with the United States losing 9 per cent during the June quarter, the Europeans down 12 per cent, and Britain down 20 per cent.

Why have we been hit less hard? Because we closed our borders earlier and had more success at containing the virus. We didn’t have to lock down as hard and were able to re-open earlier.

Now back to the details of how our 7 per cent contraction came about. The great bulk of it came from consumer spending - accounting for well over half of GDP – which fell by a remarkable 12.1 per cent during the quarter.

Consumption of goods fell a bit, while consumption of services fell hugely. Why? Because staying at home and social distancing slashed our spending on services such as hospitality, recreation and transport (public, car and air).

To the fall in consumer spending we must add falls of 6.8 per cent in new home building and 6.2 per cent in business investment in new equipment and structures. Note that this continued the declines in these two areas that began well before the virus arrived, showing the economy was weak even before the crisis.

This collapse in private sector spending was partly offset by growth in two parts of the economy. First, public sector spending grew by 2.5 per cent, mainly reflecting greater health care costs. (Note that, being "transfer payments", the huge spending on the JobKeeper wage subsidy scheme shows up as an addition to wage income, while the greater spending on JobSeeker unemployment benefits also shows up as an addition to household disposable income.)

This increased government assistance, at a time when job losses meant wage income was falling, actually caused household disposable income to rise by 2.2 per cent. Combined with the remarkable fall in consumer spending, however, this helps explain why the rate of household saving leapt from 6 per cent of household income to almost 20 per cent.

Second, our international trade made a 1 percentage point positive contribution to growth because, although the volume of our exports of goods and services fell, the volume of our imports of goods and services (which subtract from growth) fell by more.

(Just so you know, partly because of this we recorded our largest quarterly current account surplus on record of $18 billion, or 3.8 per cent of GDP. This is our fifth consecutive surplus, the longest run of surpluses since the 1970s. For a financial capital-importing economy like ours, this is actually a sign of economic weakness.)

Remembering that the outlook for coming quarters isn’t bright, I leave the last, sobering word to the ANZ Bank’s economics team: “Significant further stimulus over the next few years is likely to be required to generate growth and jobs and drive the unemployment rate down.”

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The tables have turned in our economic dealings with the world

If you know your economic onions, you know that our economy has long run a deficit in trade with the rest of the world which, when you add our net payments of interest and dividends to foreigners, means we’ve long run a deficit on the current account of our balance of payments and, as a consequence, have a huge and growing foreign debt.

Except that this familiar story has been falling apart for the past five years, and is no longer true. In that time, our economic dealings with the rest of the world have been turned on their head.

Last week the Australian Bureau of Statistics announced that we’d actually run a surplus on the current account of $8.4 billion in March quarter. Does that surprise you? It shouldn’t because it was the fourth quarterly surplus in a row.

But that should surprise you because the first of those surpluses, for the June quarter last year, was the first surplus in 44 years. And now we’ve clocked up four in a row, that’s the first 12-month surplus we’ve run since 1973.

Of course, when the balance on a country’s current account turns from deficit to surplus, its net foreign liabilities to the rest of the world stop going up and start going down.

What’s brought about this remarkable transformation? Various factors, the greatest of which is our decade-long resources boom, which occurred because the rapid development of China’s economy led to hugely increased demand for our coal, natural gas and iron ore.

A massive rise in the world prices of those commodities, which began in 2004 and continued until 2011, prompted a boom in the construction of new mines and gas facilities which peaked in 2013. From then on, the volume of our exports of minerals and energy grew strongly as new mines came online.

But while our mining exports expanded greatly, the completion of the new mines and gas facilities meant a fall in our extensive imports of expensive mining equipment. As a consequence, our balance of trade in goods and services – which between 1980 and 2015 averaged a deficit equivalent to 1.25 per cent of gross domestic product – has been in surplus ever since.

The rise of China’s middle class gets much of the credit for another development that’s helped our trade balance: strong growth in our exports of services, particularly inbound tourism and the sale of education to overseas students.

When our country has gone since white settlement as a net importer of foreign financial capital – which has been necessary because our own savings haven’t been sufficient to fund all the physical investment needed to take full advantage of our country’s huge potential for economy development – it’s not surprising we have a lot of foreign investment in Australian businesses and have borrowed a lot of money from foreigners.

In which case, it’s not surprising that every quarter we have to pay foreigners a lot more in interest and dividends on their investments in our economy than they have to pay us on our investments in their economies.

This “net income deficit” – which is the other main component of the current account - has grown enormously since the breakdown of the post-World War II “Bretton Woods” system of fixed exchange rates prompted us to float our dollar in 1983 and started a revolution in banks and businesses in one country lending and investing in other countries, including the rise of multinational corporations.

That was when Australia’s net foreign debt started rising rapidly and the net income deficit began to dominate our current account. The net income deficit has averaged a massive 3.4 per cent of GDP since the late 1980s.

It hasn’t changed much since the tables started turning five years ago. Except for one thing. The rapid growth in our superannuation funds since the introduction of compulsory employee super in the early 1990s has seen so much Australian investment in the shares of foreign companies that, since 2013, the value of our “equity” investment in other countries’ companies has exceeded the value of more than two centuries of other countries’ investment in our companies.

At March 31, Australia had net foreign equity assets worth $338 billion. You’d expect this to have significantly reduced our quarterly net income deficit, but it hasn’t. Why not? Because the dividends we earn on our investments in foreign companies aren’t as great as the dividends foreigners earn on their ownership of our companies. Why not? Because our hugely profitable mining industry is three-quarters foreign-owned.

If you add our net foreign equity assets and our net foreign debt to get our net foreign liabilities, they’ve been falling as a percentage of GDP for the past decade. If you look at the absolute dollar amount, just since December 2018 it’s fallen by more than 20 per cent.

If all this sounds too good to be true, it’s certainly not as good as it looks. The final major factor helping to explain the improvement in our external position is the weakness in the economy over the 18 months before the arrival of the virus shock.

The alternative way to see what’s happening in our dealings with the rest of the world is to focus on what’s happening to national saving relative to national (physical) investment. That’s because the difference between how much the nation saves and how much it invests equals the balance on the current account.

Turns out that national investment has fallen in recent times (business investment is weak, home building has collapsed and government investment in infrastructure is falling back) while national saving has increased (households have been saving more, mining companies have been retaining much of their high profits, and governments have been increasing their operating surpluses).

So much so that the nation is now saving more than it’s investing, giving us a current account surplus. But this is a recipe for weaker not faster “jobs and growth”.

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Unions conspire with bankers to make you pay more super

When is big business most successful at "rent-seeking" – winning special favours – from government? Often, when it’s got its unions on board. That way, both the Coalition and Labor are inclined to give it the privileges it seeks.

Despite the decline in the union movement’s power and influence in recent decades – and all the nasty things the bosses continue saying about unions – it’s very much a product of the capitalist system.

Over the decades, its greatest success has come in industries with some form of pricing power that’s allowing businesses to make outsized profits. The union simply applies pressure for the workers to be given their share of the lolly.

What kept Australia’s manufacturing industry heavily protected against competition from imports for most of the 20th century, before the Hawke-Keating government pulled the plug in the 1980s, was the manufacturing unions’ strong support for the manufacturers’ success in getting the Coalition committed to protection.

In the end, however, the manufacturing unions got screwed. While being protected in the name of preserving jobs, the manufacturers began automating and shedding many jobs. Turns out protection is better at protecting profits than jobs.

In last year’s election campaign, some part of Labor’s ambivalence on the question of new coal mines in North Queensland is explained by the support the Construction, Forestry, Maritime, Mining and Energy Union, one of the few remaining powerful unions, has thrown behind the foreign mine owners.

At present, however, there’s no more significant instance of the unions being in bed with the bosses than their joint campaign to have the government increase compulsory employee superannuation contributions.

When it comes to government-granted favours to business, there aren’t many bigger than the one that compels almost all the nation’s workers to hand over 9.5 per cent of their wage, every year of their working lives, to financial institutions which will charge them a small fortune each year to "manage" their money, until the government thinks they’re old enough to be allowed to get their money back.

I’ve supported compulsory super since it began because, when it comes to saving for retirement, most of us suffer from myopia. But it does leave the government with huge obligations to ensure the money’s safely invested, ensure super tax incentives aren’t biased in favour of the highly paid (such as yours truly) and ensure the money managers don’t abuse the monopoly they’ve been granted by overcharging the punters.

And, since most of us also save for retirement in ways other than super (such as by buying a house and paying it off), governments have an obligation to ensure that workers aren’t compelled to save more than needed to live in reasonable comfort in retirement.

Compulsory super is such an easy money-maker for the for-profit financial institutions (mainly bank-owned) that it’s not surprising they’ve gone for years trying to con governments into increasing the percentage of their wages that workers are compelled to hand over. They’ve done this by exploiting people’s instinctive fear that they aren’t saving enough, using greatly exaggerated estimates of how much they’ll need to be comfortable.

What’s harder to understand is why the non-profit "industry" super funds – with union officials making up half their trustees and the employer reps not taking much interest – go along with the for-profit industry lobby groups’ self-interested empire-building.

The main reason compulsory super isn’t a particularly good deal for most union members is that when forced to pay super contributions, employers reduce their workers’ pay rises to fit. This has been understood from the outset, but last week’s report from the Grattan Institute convincingly demonstrates its truth.

The second reason is that, by design and above certain limits, super savings reduce workers’ eligibility for the age pension. Treasury and independent analysts have repeatedly discredited the industry’s claims that the present contribution rate is insufficient to provide workers with a reasonably comfortable retirement.

The present legislated plan to raise the contribution rate to 12 per cent represents the industry funds’ gift to the army of ticket-clippers making their living off the super industry. It’s origins lie in the Rudd government yielding to industry fund pressure because it believed the huge cost to the budget would be more than covered by its wonderful new mining tax.

But, as an earlier Grattan report has shown, raising the contribution rate as planned would force many workers to accept a lower-than-otherwise standard of living during their working lives so their living standard in retirement could be higher than they ever were used to when working.

This is the union movement protecting its members’ interests? Sounds to me more like union officials expanding the union institution at the expense of their members – and delivering for the banks’ "retail" super funds while they’re at it.

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If you think surpluses are always good, prepare for great news

Don’t look now, but Australians’ economic dealings with the rest of the world have transformed while our attention has been elsewhere. Business economists are predicting that, on Tuesday, we’ll learn that the usual deficit on the current account of the balance of payments has become a surplus.

If so, it will be the first quarterly surplus in 44 years. If not, we’ll come damn close.

You have to be old to appreciate what a remarkable transformation that is. Back in the 1980s we were so worried about the rise in the current account deficit and the foreign debt that it was a regular subject for radio shock jocks’ outrage. They knew nothing about what it meant, but they did know that “deficit” and “debt” were very bad words.

By the 1990s, Professor John Pitchford, of the Australian National University, had convinced the nation’s economists that the rises were a product of the globalisation of financial markets and the move to floating exchange rates, and weren’t a big deal.

By now, economists have become so relaxed about the “balance of payments” that it’s rarely mentioned. So news of the disappearing deficit will be a surprise to many.

To begin at the beginning, the balance of payments is a summary record of all the monetary transactions during a period that have an Australian business, government or individual on one end and a foreign business, government or individual on the other.

The record is divided into two accounts, the current account and the capital and financial account.  The balance on the current account is always exactly offset by the balance on the capital account. If one has a deficit of $X billion, the other must have a surplus of $X billion, so that the balance of (international) payments is in balance at all times.

As a Reserve Bank explainer says, the current account captures the net flow of money resulting from our international trade. The capital account captures the net flows of financial capital needed to make all the exporting, importing and income payments possible. These flows during the period change the amounts of Australia’s stocks of assets and liabilities at the end of the period.

To work out the balance on the current account, first you take the value of all our exports of goods and services and subtract the value of all our imports of goods and services, to get the balance of trade.

Then you take all the interest income and dividends we earnt from our investments in foreign countries and subtract all the interest and dividend payments we make to foreigners who’ve lent us money or invested in our companies.

The result is the “net income deficit” which, after you’ve added it to the trade balance, gives you the balance on the current account. As Michael Blythe, chief economist at the Commonwealth Bank, noted this week, that balance has been a deficit for 133 of the past 159 years.

Why do we almost always run a deficit? Because our land abounds in nature’s gifts, and there’s great opportunity to exploit those gifts and earn wealth for toil. What we’ve always been short of, however, is the financial capital needed to take advantage of all the opportunities.

Moving from poetry to econospeak, for pretty much all of our modern history Australia has been a net importer of (financial) capital, as Reserve deputy Dr Guy Debelle said in a revealing speech this week.

Because we don’t save enough to allow us to fully exploit all our opportunities for economic development, we’ve always drawn on the savings of foreigners – either by borrowing from them or letting them buy into Australian businesses.

Blythe says “the shortfall reflects high investment rather than low saving. By running current account deficits, we have been able to sustain a higher [physical] investment rate than we could fund ourselves. Economic growth rates and living standards have been higher than otherwise as result.”

True. And Debelle agrees, noting that Australia’s rate of saving is on par with many other advanced economies. (So don’t let any silly pollies or shock jocks tell you a current account deficit means we’re “living beyond our means”.)

Be sure you understand this: a current account deficit is fully funded by the corresponding surplus on the capital account, which represents the amount by which we needed to call on the savings of foreigners because the nation’s physical investment in new housing, business plant and structures, and public infrastructure during the period exceeded the nation’s saving (by households, companies and governments) during the period.

But if all that’s true, how come we’re expecting a current account surplus in the June quarter? It’s a combination of long-term changes in the structure of our economy that have been working to reduce the deficit, and temporary factors that may push us over the line.

Debelle says that between the early 1980s and the end of the noughties, the deficit averaged the equivalent of about 4 per cent of gross domestic product. But it’s narrowed since 2015 and is now about 1 per cent of GDP.

Most of this change is explained by the trade balance. It averaged a deficit of about 1.25 per cent of GDP over the three decades to 2015, but since then has moved into surplus. It hit record highs during the three months to June, totalling a surplus of $19.7 billion for the quarter.

The resources boom has hugely increased the quantity of our minerals and energy exports, and there’s been a temporary surge in the price we’re getting for our iron ore. At the same time, the end of the investment phase of the resources boom has greatly reduce our imports of mining and gas equipment.

The rise of China and east Asia also means protracted strong growth in our exports of education and tourism.

At the same time, the net income deficit has widened a little in recent years but, at 3.4 per cent of GDP, is in the middle of its range since the late 1980s.

The marked reduction in the current account deficit overall means that Australia’s stock of net foreign liabilities (debt plus equity in businesses) peaked at 60 per cent of GDP in 2009 and has now declined to 50 per cent. But that’s a story for another day.

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We're edging towards admitting we're in secular stagnation

At least since 2012, Treasury, the Reserve Bank and successive governments have assured us a return to the old normal of strong economic growth, high wages and low unemployment wasn’t far off. But last week big cracks emerged in governor Philip Lowe’s optimistic facade.

In all the years since then, our estimated time of arrival at the promised land has been repeatedly pushed out a year or so. On the face of it, that’s what the Reserve did yet again in its quarterly statement on monetary policy.

Forecast growth in real gross domestic product over the year to December was cut again, to 2.5 per cent (down from a predicted 3.25 per cent last November), but not to worry. By June next year it will have bounced back to trend growth of 2.75 per cent. Happy days.

But that hardly fits with Lowe’s rhetoric during his appearance before the Parliament’s economics committee on Friday. He devoted a surprising amount of time to discussing the Reserve’s possible response in the "unlikely" event that the economy stayed weak.

His own forecasts imply the need for two further rate cuts, taking the official interest rate to just 0.5 per cent.

And if it got to 0.5 per cent, the Reserve would consider some form of "quantitative easing", he said, probably lowering the longer-term risk-free rate of interest by buying government bonds and paying for them simply by crediting the sellers’ accounts at the Reserve (the modern equivalent of "printing money").

What a long way we’ve come from Lowe’s line at the first official rate cut in June. The outlook for the economy was fine, he said then, it was just that the Reserve had redone its sums and realised that, with a bit of extra monetary stimulus, it could get the unemployment rate down to 4.5 per cent without causing any problem with inflation.

Actually, when your look deeper than the latest headline forecast of an early return to trend growth in the economy, you find that, by the end of 2021, wages still wouldn’t be growing any faster than they are now. Happy days?

Larry Summers, eminent academic economist and a former US Treasury secretary, began arguing that the American and other advanced economies were caught in "secular stagnation" – a protracted period of weak growth – in 2013. Since then, many economists have agreed, though they still debate its causes.

So far, however, those naughty, negative SS-words have never crossed the lips of any Treasury or Reserve official, let alone any politician. But on Friday Lowe gave us a detailed account of the phenomenon that’s both the key explanation for, and the main evidence of the existence of, secular stagnation: the amazingly low level of world real interest rates.

"There is a structural thing going on as well, and I think it is really important we understand this. At the moment, right around the world, there is an elevated desire to save and a depressed desire to invest," Lowe said.

"You see a lot of global savings because of demographic factors [population ageing]. There is a lot of saving in Asia [because they don’t have a social security system]. Many people borrowed too much in previous times and now they’re having to repair their balance sheets, so they want to save a bit more [paying off debt is a form of saving].

"There is a lot of desire to save and, right at the moment, not many firms want to invest. The reality we face is that, if a lot of people want to save and not many people want to use those savings to build new [physical] capital, savers are going to get low returns.

"The way the financial system works is that the central banks are the ones who set the interest rates, but we’re really responding to this deep structural shift in the balance between saving and investment right around the world and there’s not much we [central bankers] can do about that."

Just so. Two points. First, the "deep structural shift" began even before the global financial crisis. It’s not just the product of recent worry about a trade war – although that does provide econocrats and politicians with a convenient excuse to shift from their she’ll-be-right rhetoric.

Second, unprecedented low interest rates are a symptom of a deeper problem: aggregate (total) demand is insufficient to take up aggregate supply. That’s why growth is weak and will stay weak until a solution is found.

Where’s the additional demand to come from? Not from lower interest rates, obviously. Which leaves the budget. Now’s the time to rebuild public infrastructure and do other useful things we thought we couldn’t afford.

Anyone who still thinks now’s a good time to run budget surpluses just doesn’t get it. It’s now neither sensible nor possible. Wake up, Josh.

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You'd be surprised what's propping up our living standard

It’s the last lazy long weekend before the year really gets started, making it a good time to ponder a question that’s trickier than it seems: where has our wealth come from?

The question comes from a reader.

“Australia has been without a recession for 25 or more years, the economy seems booming to me, just by looking around: employment, housing prices, explosive building in major capitals, etc. Where is the wealth coming from? Mining? Other exports? Because the resources have to come from somewhere,” he writes.

That’s the first thing he’s got right: it’s not money that matters (the central bank can create as much of that stuff as it sees fit) it’s what money is used to buy: access to “real resources” – which economists summarise as land (including minerals and other raw materials), labour and (physical) capital.

But here’s the first surprise: of those three, when you trace it right back, probably the most important resource is labour – all the work we do.

The first complication, however, is the word “wealth”, which can mean different things. It’s best used to refer to the value of the community’s assets: its housing, other land and works of art, the equipment, structures and intellectual property owned by businesses (part of which is represented by capitalised value of shares on the stock exchange), plus publicly owned infrastructure (railways, roads, bridges and so forth) and structures.

To get net wealth you subtract any debts or other liabilities acquired in the process of amassing the wealth. In the case of a national economy, the debts we owe each other cancel out, leaving what we owe to foreigners. (According to our national balance sheet, as calculated by the Australian Bureau of Statistics, at June last year our assets totalled $15.4 trillion, less net liabilities to the rest of the world of $3.5 trillion.)

But often the word wealth is used to refer to our annual income, the total value of goods and services produced in the market during a year, as measured by gross domestic product (which in the year to June was $1.8 trillion).

The people in an economy generate income by applying their labour to land and physical capital, to produce myriad goods and services. Most of these they sell to each other, but some of which they sell to foreigners. Why? So they can buy other countries’ exports of goods and services.

Only about 20 per cent of our income comes from selling stuff to foreigners and only 20 per cent or so of the stuff we buy comes from foreigners. This exchange leaves us better off when we sell the stuff we’re better at producing than they are, and buy the stuff they’re better at than we are.

Much of what we sell to foreigners is minerals and energy we pull from the ground and food and fibres we grow in the ground. So it’s true that a fair bit of our wealth is explained by what economists call our “natural endowment”, though it’s also true that we’re much more skilled at doing the mining and farming than most other countries are.

Speaking of skills, the more skilled our workers are – the better educated and trained – the greater our income and wealth. Economists call this “human capital” – and it’s worth big bucks to us.

How do the people in an economy add a bit more to their wealth each year? Mainly by saving some of their income rather than consuming it all. We save not just through bank accounts, but by slowly paying off our mortgages and putting 9.5 per cent of our wages into superannuation.

It’s the role of the financial sector to lend our savings to people wanting to invest in the assets we count as wealth: homes, business structures and equipment and public infrastructure. So if most of our annual income comes from wages, most of our savings come from wage income and our savings finance much of the investment in additional assets.

But because our natural endowment and human capital give us more investment opportunities that can be financed from our savings, we long have called on the savings of foreigners to allow us to invest more in new productive assets each year than we could without their participation.

Some of the foreigners’ savings come as “equity investment” – their ownership of Australian businesses and a bit of our real estate – but much of it is just borrowed. These days, however, our companies’ (and super funds’) ownership of businesses or shares in businesses in other countries is worth roughly as much as foreigners’ equity investments in Oz, meaning all our net liability to the rest of the world is debt.

Naturally, the foreigners have to be rewarded for the savings they’ve sunk into our economy. We pay them about $60 billion a year in interest and dividends, on top of the interest and dividends they pay us.

The main thing we get in return for this foreign investment in our economy is more jobs (and thus wage income) than we’d otherwise have, plus the taxes the foreigners pay.

People worry we can’t go on forever getting wealthy by digging up our minerals and flogging them off to foreigners. It’s true we may one day run out of stuff to sell, but our reserves – proved and yet to be proved – are so huge that day is maybe a century away (and the world will have stopped buying our coal long before we run out).

A bigger worry is the damage we’re doing to our natural environment in the meantime, which should be counted as reducing our wealth, but isn’t.

But mining activity accounts for a smaller part of our high standard of living than most people imagine – only about 8 per cent of our annual income.

Most of our prosperity – our wealth, if you like – derives from the skill, enterprise and technology-enhanced hard work of our people.

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Little Aussie battler battles on to future glory

Have you noticed how people are getting more upbeat about the economy? It's no bad thing. And, on the face of it, the figures we got this week confirmed their growing confidence.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics' national accounts showed that real gross domestic product grew by a very healthy 0.8 per cent in the June quarter. That's equivalent to annualised growth of 3.6 per cent.

But GDP growth is far too volatile from quarter to quarter for such calculations to make much sense (even though it's what the Americans do). And, just to ensure we don't get too confident, we have a media skilled in finding the lead lining to every silver cloud.

They lost no time in pointing out that half that growth came from increased consumer spending during the quarter of 0.7 per cent. But this return to strong growth was unlikely to be sustained because weak growth in wages meant much of the spending was covered not by an increase in household income, but by a decline households' rate of saving.

The household saving rate had fallen from 5.3 per cent of household disposable income to 4.6 per cent. Indeed, this was the fifth successive quarterly fall from a rate of 7 per cent in March 2016.

It's undeniable that we won't get back to truly healthy economic growth until we see a return to wages growing in real terms. And it's hard to know how long this will take.

Without doubt, weak wage growth is the biggest cloud on our economic horizon.

But the story on the decline in our rate of saving isn't as dire as the figures imply. Saving is calculated as a residual (household income minus consumer spending), meaning any mismeasurement of either income or spending - or both - means the estimate of saving is wrong, and likely to be revised as more accurate figures come to hand.

This time three months ago, for instance, we were told that for consumer spending to grow by 0.5 per cent in the March quarter, it was necessary for the saving rate to fall from 5.1 per cent to 4.7 per cent.

Huh? Obviously, the March-quarter saving rate has since been revised up 0.6 percentage points. How? By the bureau finding more household income. (The saving rate was revised up by lesser amounts in each of the previous six quarters.)

And it won't be surprising to see it happen again. We know that, according to the wage price index, average hourly rates of pay rose by 1.9 per cent over the year to June, whereas this week's national accounts tell us average earnings per hour fell by 0.8 per cent.

It's quite possible for the national accounts measure to show less growth than the wage index if employment is growing in low-paid jobs but declining in high-paid jobs, but it's hard to believe such a "change in composition" would be sufficient to explain so wide a disparity.

Moral: don't drop your bundle just yet.

A second line of negativity we've heard this week says much of the rest of the June quarter's growth came only from increased spending by governments, with government consumption contributing 0.2 percentage points and capital spending contributing 0.6 points.

Two points. First, increased spending on public infrastructure is no bad thing and, indeed, is exactly the budgetary support for stimulatory monetary policy (low interest rates) the Reserve Bank has long been calling for.

Second, the transfer of the new, private sector-built Royal Adelaide Hospital to the South Australian government during the quarter had the effect of overstating public investment for the quarter and understating business investment.

Looking at the adjusted figures for business investment, we find the good news that non-mining investment spending grew by (an upwardly revised) 2.1 per cent in the March quarter and 2.3 per cent in the latest quarter, to be up 6.1 per cent over the year to June.

That says the long-awaited recovery of business investment in the non-mining economy (the other 92 per cent) is well under way. It's also good to know that the long, growth-reducing decline in mining investment isn't far from ending.

Growth in home-building activity was negligible during the June quarter, although Treasurer Scott Morrison says there's a "solid pipeline of dwelling construction" remaining.

The volume of exports of goods and services rose by 2.7 per cent during the quarter, offset by a rise of 1.2 per cent in the volume of imports, implying a net contribution to growth of 0.3 percentage points in the quarter.

However, this was more than countered by a negative contribution of 0.6 percentage points from a fall in inventories, mainly a rundown of the grain stockpile. (That is, grain produced in an earlier quarter was exported in the latest quarter.)

Rural export volumes rose by 18.7 per cent over the year to June. Exports of services were also strong, having averaged annual growth of more than 7 per cent over the past three years, driven by exports of education and tourism.

So, overall, economic growth in the June quarter was a mixed picture which, following a contraction of 0.4 per cent in September quarter last year and - also weather-related - weak growth of 0.3 per cent in March quarter this year, amounted to growth of just 1.8 per cent over the year to June.

This is artificially low, but the September quarter should see us bounce up to artificially high annual growth of about 3 per cent, as last September quarter's minus 0.4 per cent drops out of the calculation.

If you want more persuasive support for our more optimistic mood, however, don't forget employment grew by a super-strong 214,000 in just the first seven months of this year – with 93 per cent of those jobs full-time – and leading indicators showing more jobs strength to come, plus surveys of business conditions showing them at their best in almost a decade.

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How we've grown for so long: safety valves and buffers

How has poor little Oz managed to keep our economy growing continuously for 25 years while, in the same period, other economies have suffered a recession or even two? We've had good insurance policies.

That's the answer the new Reserve Bank governor, Dr Philip Lowe, gave in a speech this week. As he explains it, however, it's a detailed story.

Actually, there are two parts to his explanation for our economic success: the first is our good "fundamentals" and the second is our ability to ride out the various "economic shocks" that hit every economy from time to time.

Lowe lists our good fundamentals as including our abundance of natural resources, our well-educated workforce, our "generally favourable demographics" (I think he means our growing population and that our ageing population isn't too aged), our openness to international trade and investment, our links with the fast-growing Asian region, and our demonstrated ability to reform the structure of our economy to boost its productivity.

Lowe adds that the reforms of the 1980s and '90s have given us a more flexible economy, one better able to roll with the punches than it used to be. He nominates three key areas of greater flexibility: our exchange rate, our conduct of monetary policy and our labour market.

Since we allowed our dollar to float in 1983, it has generally moved up or down in response to developments in ways that tend to limit inflation pressure and to stabilise growth.

Since we decided in the mid-1990s to let the central bank - rather than the politicians - make decisions about when to increase or decrease interest rates, as guided by the target of keeping inflation between 2 and 3 per cent on average over the medium term, we've kept the inflation rate reasonably stable and minimised swings in unemployment.

Since we ended the centralised wage-fixing system and moved to collective bargaining at the enterprise level in the first half of the 1990s, we've avoided wage inflation, kept real wages rising in line with improvements in productivity (until recently, anyway) and made employers less inclined to respond to downturns with mass layoffs.

These great areas of flexibility - the floating exchange rate, the independent, target-based approach to monetary policy (interest rates), and enterprise-based wage-fixing - have helped us avoid being derailed by economic shocks.

And it's not as if there's been a shortage of such shocks that could have derailed us, Lowe says.

First, there was the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, which did derail some of our Asian trading partners. Then there was the bust of the US tech boom - the Tech Wreck of 2001 - then the global financial crisis of 2008-09.

 As well, there's the resources boom. With its once-in-a-century surge and then collapse in coal and iron ore prices and consequent surge and falloff in mining construction, the resources boom was a massive, decade-long shock to our economy.

Australia's economic history is littered with commodity booms soon leading to recessions, but not this one (except in Western Australia, thanks to mismanagement by its state government).

But all that's just by way of background. Lowe's main point is to draw attention to the way our possession of certain "buffers" absorbs some of the blow when shocks hit.

We build up and hold these buffers as a kind of insurance policy against the day when trouble arises. Like all insurance policies, they come at a cost. There's a premium to be paid.

So where do you find these buffers? On the balance sheets of banks, governments and households. They're about ensuring your assets exceed your liabilities by a decent safety margin, in case some unexpected problem arises.

In the years leading up to the global financial crisis, our banks maintained higher ratios - of their shareholders' capital to their lending to borrowers - than did banks in America and Europe.

That's why our banks were able to keep lending after the crisis, whereas the others weren't. Their inability to keep lending amplified the original shock.

In the years since then, international authorities have imposed higher levels of capital adequacy and liquidity on the world's banks, including ours.

These greater restrictions make banks safer, but also reduce their profitability. We're still waiting to see how the cost of this insurance premium will be shared between our banks' customers and their shareholders.

At the time of the financial crisis, our government had "positive net debt" - it had more money in the bank than it owed to people holding its bonds.

This made it a lot easier for our government to support the economy by borrowing and spending. Now, Lowe argues, we need to gradually move the budget from deficit back to surplus, rebuilding our fiscal buffer for the next time it's needed.

The total debts of our households have risen to 185 per cent of their annual disposable income. This is a lot higher than for other rich countries, but that's partly because unusual distortions in our tax system encourage borrowing for rental properties to be done by individuals rather than big companies.

More to the point, households have been building up buffers by using mortgage offset and redraw facilities to reduce their net debt by 17 per cent of the gross debt, in the process getting a collective 2½ years ahead of their scheduled repayments.

More than half of all households with mortgage debt, at each level of income, are ahead on their repayments.

If you subtract from our households' debt all the money they hold in currency and bank deposits, the nation's households' net debt falls to about 100 per cent of their annual disposable income.

Our household debt is high, but we've got a fair bit of buffer.

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