Australian Treasury Secretary Steven Kennedy said the peak of unemployment “would come through in these months in April and May”. He told a senate committee, “we’d be pretty close to it would be my guess”. Though, “in a measured sense, the unemployment rate may well rise between May and June because of the switch between out of the workforce and back into the workforce.”
He added that “we’ve gone well past the world recession” but it’s hard to predict if a depression was looming. Return of consumer and business confidence was the hardest part of forecasting the recovery. And, “the question is whether you’ve avoided the destructive cycles of firms going broke because they just ran out of cash.”
