As I’ve been covering on QEW and will discuss on today’s livestream (link above), there’s a lot of exuberance and optimism about the great Aussie reopening, and PM Scott Morrison has forecast a “jobs boom” based on healthy job vacancies data (see the chart below).

We’re hearing calls from business groups to resume high levels of immigration to help fill vacancies and address skills shortages and, implicitly, to put downward pressure on wages growth (e.g. see Increase skilled migration to 200,000 per year, says leading business group). I suspect we’ll see a vigorous debate in coming months about whether we return to previous levels of immigration or instead opt for lower levels which would place less pressure on services and infrastructure and would be easier to absorb into the labour market.

In today’s livestream, I’ll also cover accelerating inflation in the UK, where the 4.2% through-the-year inflation rate recorded in October was the highest in 10 years (see chart below).

We’ll also cover the RBA’s warning about cryptocurrency earlier this week (see RBA warns of ‘faddish’ crypto crash). Crypto prices have been falling this week (see chart below), reminding us of their volatility and the unreliability of cryptocurrencies as stores of value. Of course, they have proven to be extraordinarily successful investments for many people, but we should remember that investing in crypto is akin to gambling.

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