May 25, 2021
June 1, 2021
Consumer confidence drops
Consumer confidence declined 2.5 per cent last week, as a seven-day COVID lockdown was announced in Victoria on May 27. Counterintuitively, confidence was down by more in Sydney and Brisbane than it was in Melbourne. All of the confidence subindices fell.
‘Current financial conditions’ fell by 3.0 per cent, while ‘future financial conditions’ softened 2.4 per cent. ‘Current economic conditions’ lost 0.5 per cent and ‘future economic conditions’ dropped 4.0 per cent.
‘Time to buy a major household item’ weakened 2.6 per cent. ‘Weekly inflation expectations’ increased by 0.2 percentage points to 3.9 per cent, pushing the four-week moving average up 0.1 percentage points to 3.8 per cent.
"The announcement of a seven-day lockdown in Victoria in response to an outbreak of COVID-19 has impacted consumer confidence around the country," ANZ Head of Australian Economics, David Plank said.
"Confidence fell 3.8 per cent in Melbourne, but was actually down more sharply in Brisbane (-4.7 per cent) and Sydney (-4.5 per cent)."
"ANZ-Roy Morgan survey data show short lock-downs don’t have a lasting impact on consumer sentiment. Nor has Victoria’s experience of lockdowns in 2020 driven a wedge between sentiment in that state and the rest of the country."
"This offers the prospect that even an extension of the current lockdown may not have too dramatic an impact on consumer sentiment. Of course, the absence of JobKeeper for this episode means we need to alert to worse results than the experience to date."
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