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Aug 16, 2019, 12:00 PM GMT
#Economy

The Australian Labour Market Demonstrated the Anticipated Resilience

The Australian Bureau of Statistics released its most recent report on the Labour Force, in which it outlines the changes in the employment conditions of the country for the previous month, and also demonstrates the expected short-term changes in the Australian labour market (ABS 2019).

As you may recall from our weekly expectations article from Monday, it was argued that the report was most likely to demonstrate no changes in the seasonally adjusted unemployment rate, in addition to a marginal improvement in the overall participation rate.

These initial expectations were realised, as the Australian labour force has risen with additional 41.1 thousand newly employed persons in July, whereas the total number of unemployed persons has increased only marginally with 8 thousand. Thus, the participation rate has already surpassed its previous all-time record at 66.0 by appreciating to 66.1 per cent.

Despite the short-term trend showing somewhat concerning indications on a month-to-month basis, where the short-term unemployment has risen from 5.2 to 5.3 per cent in July, the seasonally adjusted statistics confirm the resilience of the Australian labour market and will undoubtedly be perceived as welcoming news by the RBA.

Overall, the AUDUSD pair is still trading in a tight consolidation range just above the fundamentally important support level of 0.67400, which resembles quite closely an Accumulation phase that is currently forming after the major Downtrend and is a part of a larger Wyckoff cycle. Thus, the market continues to prepare for the development of a forthcoming bullish trend.