Morning Briefing: Miserable Aussie millennials fear they'll be poorer than parents

Only 8% of Aussie millennials expect to be better off financially than their parents... Central Sydney now fuels quarter of Australia's economic growth...

Morning Briefing: Miserable Aussie millennials fear they'll be poorer than parents
Miserable Aussie millennials fear they'll be poorer than parents
(Bloomberg) -- Young Australians, many of whom were only twinkles in their parents' eyes when the country last experienced a recession, are pessimistic about their prospects.

Of those born roughly between 1982 and 2002, commonly referred to as millennials, less than a third expect the economy will improve this year, according to interviews with 300 Australians that formed part of a global Deloitte survey. Worldwide, 45 percent of millennials expect things to get better in the next 12 months.

But the division between young Australians and their overseas peers is starker when it comes to their folks. Just 8 percent of millennials Down Under expect to be better off financially than mum and dad, compared with a global figure of 26 percent; even worse, only 4 percent of Aussies reckon they'll be happier than their parents, versus 23 percent internationally.``For millennials, it seems Australia no longer looks like the lucky country,” said David Hill, Deloitte Australia’s chief operating officer. ``I suspect booming house prices in the major cities of Sydney and Melbourne are partly to blame for this pessimism, with many young Australians believing the dream of owning their own home is increasingly out of reach.''Yet it's not like conditions are terrible now: they weren't trying to repay a mortgage in 1990 when the Reserve Bank of Australia's cash rate was 17.5 percent, or run a business in 1991 during the country's last official recession; and they weren't looking for work the next year when unemployment hit 11.1 percent. Indeed, with the cash rate at 1.5 percent, the economy forecast to expand 3 percent this year and the jobless rate currently 5.7 percent, conditions are pretty good. Instability, though, seems to define this group.

Central Sydney now fuels quarter of Australia's economic growth
(Bloomberg) -- Inner districts of Sydney drove almost a quarter of Australia’s expansion last fiscal year, underscoring the city’s pre-eminent position in the nation’s economy.

The area stretching from Sydney’s central business district to Macquarie Park north of the center made up 24 percent of GDP growth in the financial year through June 2016, according to consultancy SGS Economics & Planning. Inner Melbourne contributed 11.4 percent as Australia’s east coast cities perform in a similar fashion to their impact on the property market.

Australia’s economy probably expanded 0.8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016 versus the previous three months, and 2 percent from a year earlier, economists forecast ahead of data due Wednesday. A rebound in iron ore and coal prices last year may have brought some benefits to the resource-rich states of Western Australia and Queensland that have struggled since the end of a mining-investment boom.

“The Reserve Bank of Australia has to manage booming economies in Sydney and Melbourne while the rest of the country is struggling to grow in the face of a range of headwinds,” Terry Rawnsley, an economist at SGS, said Tuesday. “The stark contrast between growth rates across the country is greater now than at any period during the mining boom.”

Housing Boom
The construction industry and Sydney’s strength in domestic and global financial markets underpinned the strong performance, Rawnsley said. The city’s economic strength, combined with record-low interest rates, has contributed to Sydney’s ever-increasing home prices.

“If the RBA was setting interest rates for Sydney alone, they would be at 3.75 percent not 1.5 percent,” Rawnsley said. “The lack of economic growth in the rest of the country is contributing to the squeeze on first-time home buyers in Sydney.”