KIERAN DAVIES, ECONOMIST, BARCLAYS CAPITAL
“I think the numbers are exaggerated by sample rotation. Almost all the gain in jobs in the month was due to people rotating to the sample and not quite matching the characteristics of the people who rotated out.
“Definitely the numbers are overstated but there’s still some better results than what the market had anticipated.”
MICHAEL TURNER, STRATEGIST, RBC CAPITAL MARKETS
“You can’t ignore these numbers forever. They are strong, unemployment is low and is running ahead of most other indicators on the labour market. Even though they improved, they don’t go to that extent. We have the unemployment rate at 6.5 percent over the course of next year, so 5.8 percent now makes it harder. In the absence of significant revisions, which is always a possibility, you’d need to see things slow down a bit. We still think that it will happen next year. We have a rate cut (forecast) for Q1 and (this jobs report) does not help our argument.”
TOM KENNEDY, ECONOMIST, JP MORGAN
“We looked at the October number as almost too good to be true and you look at today’s number and it blows it out of the water even more. So two very, very strong back to back months and it’s very difficult to pin any drivers down because economic growth is still pretty soft. The firms are hiring, but I don’t know if the pace they’re hiring at is at multi-year records.
“It looks very very strong, almost too good to be true so they (the RBA) don’t over-react to one or two months of data, so they’ll see how the trend settles out and what the data does in the next one or two quarters.”