Digital Finance Analytics (DFA) Blog
"Intelligent Insight"
Today the Bank of England announced that it would maintain Bank Rate at 0.5% and the size of the Asset Purchase Programme at £375 billion. The previous change in Bank Rate was a reduction of 0.5 percentage points to 0.5% on 5 March 2009. A programme of asset purchases financed by the issuance of central … Continue reading “UK Rates Kept at 0.5%; QE Continues”
Today Glen Stevens spoke at The Econometric Society Australasian Meeting and the Australian Conference of Economists in Hobart. He gave an economic update, and included a number of messages which when taken with economic data from the ABS today, suggests that interest rates may be cut later in the year. Here are a few of … Continue reading “Will The Next Rate Movement Be Down?”
According to the ABS, in data released today, the number of dwellings approved fell 1.7 per cent in May 2014, in trend terms, and has fallen for five months. However, the seasonally adjusted estimate for total dwellings approved rose 9.9% in May after falling for three months. Approvals for units increased. The seasonally adjusted estimate … Continue reading “Building Approvals Fall Again In May – ABS”
At its meeting today, the Board decided to leave the cash rate unchanged at 2.5 per cent. “Monetary policy remains accommodative. Interest rates are very low and for some borrowers have edged lower over recent months. Savers continue to look for higher returns in response to low rates on safe instruments. Credit growth has picked … Continue reading “RBA Leaves Cash Rate Unchanged; Again.”
As we highlighted recently, the Bank of England is supporting the imposition of loan to income (LTI) ratios on banks in the UK, as a way to manage risks in the housing sector. So today, we start to explore loan to income data in Australia, captured though our rolling programme of household surveys. We start … Continue reading “Australian Household Loan To Income Ratios Are Worse Than In The UK”
The Australian Bureau of Statistics today released some important data on how many people are being cared for informally in the community. They showed that in Australia, 12 per cent of people provide informal care to an older person or to someone with a disability or long-term health condition. There were 2.7 million people providing … Continue reading “Care In The Community Growing”
In an interesting speech yesterday Dr David Gruen Executive Director Macroeconomic Group presented some startling data to the assembled company at the CEDA State of the Nation 2014 event. Citing the Gratton Institute report he said “in 2013, Australian superannuation fees ranged from approximately 0.7 per cent to 2.4 per cent of mean fund size, … Continue reading “Super Fees Are Way Too High In Australia”
Today we continue our series on the latest results from our households surveys. Following our recent posts, we had several people ask about trends around some of the metrics we use. We have been running these surveys since 1995. So in this post we present a summary of trends from 1995 onwards. It provides an … Continue reading “How Household Property Buying Intentions Have Changed Since 1995”
We continue our series on the results from our latest household surveys. Today we look at those seeking to trade up, and trade down. These are important segments, as they are both shaping the market. Looking at up-traders first, these are households looking to sell to buy a larger property. Over one million households fall … Continue reading “Trading Up and Trading Down – Latest Survey Results”
Today we start a series on our updated household surveys, which will in due course feed into our next edition of the Property Imperative, due be released later in the year. The current edition, is still available, but there are some significant changes in household intentions since then. We run our surveys continually, and so … Continue reading “Property Inactive Households Rise Again, As Market Outlook Slows”