ANZ: Activity Back To 2020 Levels

ANZ note that "Australia's lockdowns have unsurprisingly had a large impact on activity. Our overall high frequency indicator index quickly fell into negative territory. We haven't seen nationwide activity this low since October last year. In the coming week, overall activity is likely to fall further as the South Australian lockdown (not yet captured) hit the data. The lockdown in NSW has seen mobility data across Sydney drop to levels similar to what was observed in the first lockdown of 2020. Our google search sentiment index has come off a little but nothing like the response we saw during the first lockdowns in 2020. We think it shows that people are less uncertain about the lasting impact of lockdowns. The lockdowns and uncertainty they create may have some impact on housing, with house-buying related Google searches, like "stamp duty calculator", dropping a little over the last month. In NSW in particular the number of searches have plummeted."