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Earlier this week,Dr Lowe said the RBA stood ready to buy Australian government bonds in the secondary market while other options being considered include direct loans to commercial banks that must then be lent to businesses or personal customers.
The measures are aimed at stabilising the economy,which analysts now believe is deteriorating as huge parts of the country are shut down.
Figures from the NAB on Wednesday,for instance,showed bookings at sit-down restaurants were 30 per cent down this week on the same time last March. At the start of February they were only down by 1 per cent.
Data to be released by SEEK on Thursday shows job advertisements in NSW are now 13.6 per cent down over the past year,by 8.5 per cent in Victoria and by 2.6 per cent in Queensland.
ANZ senior economists Felicity Emmett and Catherine Birch said they now expect the economy to contract by 2 per cent in the June quarter alone. By year's end,economy will be 1.9 per cent smaller as businesses come back on line through later months.
Such a big hit to the economy could result in unemployment rising to 7.8 per cent. The jobless rate is currently 5.3 per cent,and an increase to 7.8 per cent equates to the an extra 300,000 people being out of work.
ANZ senior economist Felicity Emmett says the country is on track for a recession.
"Policy stimulus will help,but it won't be able to offset the demand loss that will come from social distancing and widespread closures,"they said.
Westpac also believes the economy will shrink through the first six months of the year before staging a rally through the second half.
But the bank's chief economist,Bill Evans,said unemployment was now likely to reach 7 per cent by October while many Australians would actually give up on trying to find work.
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Partial retail trade figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics suggest the pandemic is,due to hoarding by shoppers,giving a boost to the supermarket sector.
Sales were up by 0.4 per cent in February but all of that growth was due to people flooding supermarket looking for toilet paper,tinned tomatoes and pasta.
The bureau noted sales of clothing,footwear,personal accessories were all down because of the"adverse impacts from COVID-19",adding that sales through duty free stores and luxury goods had also dropped as they relied heavily on overseas visitors.
Ratings'agency S&P Global said the world was already in recession,predicting growth this year of between one and 1.5 per cent. America is facing a year of either zero growth or a fall of 0.5 per cent while China's economy would likely only grow by 3.2 per cent.
S&P chief economist Paul Gruenwald said it was clear that as countries were forced to close down their economies to deal with the virus,the financial impact would be severe.
"The initial data from China suggests that its economy was hit far harder than projected,though a tentative stabilisation has begun,"he said.
"Europe and the US are following a similar path,as increasing restrictions on person-to-person contacts presage a demand collapse that will take activity sharply lower in the second quarter before a recovery begins later in the year."