During a presentation to the Victorian Transport Association State Conference, JANA Investment Advisers senior consultant Jeremy Wilmot discussed the global economic trends. In regards the USA, Mr Wilmot said there had been a rise in consumer confidence since the election of President Trump. “Pleasingly, businesses are also pretty confident in the US. Business confidence is back to 20-year highs. The economy is doing reasonably well,” Mr Wilmot said.

“The risk here is a lot of this is ‘soft data’ – they ask people how they are feeling. “Not a lot of this is flowing through into hard data. People aren’t actually spending more money or buying new cars,” he said. “Generally, when you have sentiment this strong it normally flows into good economic conditions but we are yet to see that.”

In relation to China, Mr Wilmot said since the latter part of 2015 and through 2016, Chinese authorities had really pushed for growth. They promised growth to the world but they also promised it to their people. Unfortunately how they've grown and continue to do so is through credit growth, which will lead to a soaring overall debt. This is workable up to a certain point, but would not create a sustainable Chinese economy.

In Europe, Mr Wilmot noted ongoing issues of high youth unemployment, particularly Spain and Italy.

Turning to Australia, he noted the decline in exports from outside the resources sector since 2003-04, as the mining boom forced up the value of the Aussie dollar. “If you go back to 2003-04, there were four big export industries from Australia and they were all pretty stable. What you have seen since 2004 is that massive rise in China and massive rise in demand for resources, particularly iron ore and coal. This has been detrimental to other industries including manufacturing. It has been very difficult for Australian exporters to compete on the global scale.” said Mr Wilmot.