Today has already brought some good economic news for the UK so let us get straight to it. From the chief economist of the Nationwide Building Society.
“UK house price growth remained subdued in March, with
prices just 0.7% higher than the same month last year”
As you can see he is not keen, but I am pleased that if we look at the trend for wage growth we are now seeing annual wage growth of over 2% with respect to house prices. So there will be some welcome relief for those wishing to trade up and especially for first-time buyers. Of course it will take a long time to offset the long hard haul that led to this being reported by out official statisticians only yesterday.
On average, full-time workers could expect to pay an estimated 7.8 times their annual workplace-based earnings on purchasing a home in England and Wales in 2018. Housing affordability in England and Wales stayed at similar levels in 2018, following five years of decreasing affordability.
If you want the equivalent of earnings ratio porn then there was this from an area I will be cycling through later.
Kensington and Chelsea remained the least affordable local authority in 2018, with average house prices being 44.5 times workplace-based average annual earnings.
However returning to the Nationwide there are ch-ch-changes going on.
London was the weakest performing region in Q1, with
prices 3.8% lower than the same period of 2018 – the fastest
pace of decline since 2009 and the seventh consecutive
quarter in which prices have declined in the capital.
Indeed as there have been discussions about the Midlands in the comments section I took a look at the quarterly data which showed them growing at 2.6% in the West and 2.5% in the East. So as ever the picture is complex although even there we are seeing real wage gains albeit only small ones.
Also we need to remind ourselves that this covers Nationwide customers only although the numbers do fit the patterns we have been observing through other sources. Also whilst I welcome the change it seems clear that The Guardian does not.
Slide driven by London and south-east slowdown as Brexit chaos seems to put off buyers.
The economy
This mornings economic growth or Gross Domestic Product release brought some further good news. Not from the last quarter of 2018 which remained at 0.2% but from this.
There has been an upward revision of 0.1 percentage points to GDP growth in Quarter 3 (July to Sept) 2018 to 0.7%, due to revisions to estimates of government services; In comparison with the same quarter a year ago, UK GDP increased by a revised 1.4%.
So we did a little better on 2018 and in particular had a really spectacular third quarter. It does look out of kilter with the rest of the year but let me point out that something which regularly gets the blame for once gets a little credit.
where some of this activity is likely to have reflected one-off effects of the warm weather and the World Cup.
There are two catches in the series however. The first is the issue of investment which has been having a troubled period.
There have been some upward revisions to business investment in Quarter 3 and Quarter 4 2018 because of later survey returns, but business investment still fell in every quarter of 2018.
So not as bad as previously reported but even so there has been an issue here.
Business investment has now fallen for four consecutive quarters – the first such instance since 2009 –driven mainly by declines in transport equipment as well as IT equipment and other machinery. The latest estimates show that there have been some upward revisions in the second half of 2018, with business investment now estimated to have fallen by 0.9% in Quarter 4.
These revisions to the quarterly path have resulted in an upward revision to the annual figure with business investment falling 0.4% in 2018.
This is a bit of a ying and yang factor as the issue over future trade relationships and a possible Brexit are factors here. The optimistic view is that once there is more certainty it will not only pick up it will regain much of the lost ground. Maybe we will find out more later although of course today was supposed to be the day we got certainty!
Also there is this hardy perennial.
The UK current account deficit widened by £0.7 billion to £23.7 billion in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2018, or 4.4% of gross domestic product (GDP), the largest deficit recorded since Quarter 3 (July to Sept) 2016 in both value and percentage of GDP terms….Annually, the UK current account deficit widened to 3.9% of GDP in 2018, compared with 3.3% in 2017.
Regular readers will be aware I have major doubts about the accuracy of these numbers, specifically about the lack of detail we get about the important services sector. However the trend was worse last year probably driven by the weakening trade outlook generally. Here is how we paid for it.
The UK mainly financed its current account deficit through portfolio investment, where UK investors disinvested in foreign equity and debt securities, while overseas investors increased their holdings of UK debt securities.
Even more care is needed with those numbers as when you start looking into them they are built on what are often in my opinion dubious assumptions.
Unsecured Credit
With house price growth slowing Bank of England Governor Mark Carney will have a an even deeper frown today as he reads this.
The annual growth rate of consumer credit has continued to slow, though more gradually than during the second half of 2018. At 6.3% in February , it was well below its peak of 10.9% in November 2016. Within this, the growth rate of both credit card lending and other loans and advances fell slightly.
The rest of us will have another sigh of relief although there are two problems. The first is that an annual rate of growth of 6.3% is far higher than anything else in the economy. It is around double the rate of wage growth and more than quadruple the annual economic growth we have seen. The other is that the latest two monthly numbers at £1.2 and now £1.1 billion show signs of a rebound so it is a case of “watch this space” for subsequent months.
Money Supply
We saw some broad money growth in February.
The total amount of money held by UK households, private non-financial corporations (PNFCs) and non-intermediary other financial corporations (NIOFCs) (broad money or M4ex) increased by £3.6 billion in February.
The waters were muddied by a large Gilt maturity in February and the Operation Twist QE bond buying we have seen in March so far. Meaning we may see a pick up in the March data although it is unclear how much will be recorded as being the financial sector and hence ignored. The annual rate of growth at 2% in February is little to write home about but was a rise.
Comment
The UK data releases have been pretty solid today. Economic growth has been revised higher and there is a hint of better money supply growth. This comes with the usual caveats of high unsecured credit growth and a balance of payments deficit. Let me move onto the numbers which illustrate my point via something which gets widely ignored in the UK data which is inventories or stocks. I was struggling to get my head around this.
There was a £4.2 billion increase in inventories in Quarter 4 2018, including alignment adjustments and balancing adjustments. However, excluding these adjustments the estimates show a slight decrease of £1.2 billion in stocks being held by UK companies.
If you are going Eh? “You are not alone” as Olive sang but let me help out by pointing out there was a £3 billion balancing adjustment in the numbers which is quite a bit more than the economic growth reported so let us hope they were right.
Let me end on some better news as there was this also.
Nominal gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 0.7% in Quarter 4 (Oct to Dec) 2018, revised up from 0.6% in the first quarterly estimate.