Consumer confidence: steady to the end of the year

• ANZ-Roy Morgan Australian Consumer Confidence was essentially unchanged last week, rising just 0.1%.
• Current financial conditions were down 2%, while future financial conditions were flat for the week.
• Economic conditions readings were mixed, with current economic conditions up 0.2% while future economic conditions lost 0.9%.
• The ‘time to buy a household item’ gained the most among the subindices, rising 2.7%. Four-week moving average inflation expectations were up by 0.1 ppt at 4.3%.

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ANZ’s Head of Australian Economics, David Plank, commented:

“Consumer sentiment was basically unchanged over the past week. The upward movement in the “time to buy a household item” was a good sign considering the holiday season, though still below its long-run average. In this final survey for the year, consumer sentiment finished well above average, though below the highs of earlier in the year. It is a touch higher than at the end of 2017. Not a bad outcome, given that households have faced a barrage of negative news in recent months about the state of the housing market and what it might mean for the economy. It seems there are sufficient offsets to this news; among them, a still robust labour market. The November employment report on Thursday will tell us just how robust, though we always caution against reading too much into what can be a volatile data series.”

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