Here's my summary of the key news overnight to keep you up-to-date over these holidays.
US companies added more workers than projected in December as employers grew more optimistic about the prospects for demand, the ADP Report showed this morning. The 238,000 new jobs added was the best month in 2013 and the previous month was revised higher too. The weakest sector for hiring was banking and finance. The official BLS data is due out Saturday our time.
In China, hiring demand has hit a five year low, according to a local survey. The biggest decreases are in manufacturing, while the biggest increases are in banking and finance.
In the Eurozone, unemployment held steady at 19.1 million, or 12.1%, according to official figures out overnight. This was despite stronger than expected retail sales in Europe in December.
In Norway, however, things are great directly because of how they have invested their oil wealth. Overnight, the 5.1 million Norwegians had NOK5.1 trillion (Norwegian crowns) in that fund, a million each. Ironically, there are 5.1 NOKs to the NZD. Their unemployment rate is not 5.1% however, it is 3.4%.
The next fix on New Zealand's job growth will not come until February 5.
US oil and gas prices fell again overnight although Brent crude prices rise marginally. Gold is lower too and still lower than US$1,230/oz. The Dow is down marginally in afternoon trade.
Today we get November building consent data for New Zealand, and the December commodity price indexes.
The NZ dollar starts today still holding at 82.7 USc, 93.0 AUc, and the TWI is at 78.5.
The easiest place to stay up with today's event risk is by following our Economic Calendar here »
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Doing Business with China the Australian way
Or, how to keep your domestic unemployment numbers down
China's CITIC Pacific’s Sino Iron project (in WA) produced its much-awaited first shipment of iron ore concentrate in December last year, $US6 billion over budget and four years behind schedule
CITIC and its principal contractor, the Metallurgical Corporation of China (MCC), severely underestimated the cost of construction in Australia. The budget soared from $US1.75 billion in June 2007 to $US4.3 billion at the end of December 2011.
“We don’t understand the actual conditions of building large mining projects in Australia. We tried to apply our lessons learnt in China locally and severely underestimated the difficulty of the project. As a result, we went on a detour,” Chang told the People’s Daily.
One of MCC’s cardinal sins was to misjudge Australia’s tough immigration control. Chinese contractors thought they could bring in battalions of cheap and skilled Chinese construction workers. Despite its intensive lobbying in Canberra, MCC could only bring in a small contingent of qualified workers.
In fact, CITIC senior executives even had to take turns to cook as they could not bring in a Chinese chef. At the peak of construction, CITIC employed 4,000 construction workers and Chinese workers accounted for less than 5 per cent of the total workforce. Chang was further shocked by high wages in Western Australia. He told bewildered Chinese reporters that a truck driver in WA earned $150,000 on average, about 17 times China’s average urban salary. chinas-shock-and-ore-the-australian-way
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