If economists have any real value, it’s whether we can pick an uptrend or downtrend for the economy and jobs. And with the CBA show-and-tell result, we’ve been given a valuable insight on how we are going.

This follows some great readings on sales and profits for our well-known retailers. But there is a fly in the ointment and that’s poor old Victoria’s current lockdown challenges. That said, the rest of the economy is doing well, considering these challenges that we’re facing as a nation.

As we started coming out of the Coronavirus crash, I went looking for reliable economic indicators that told me how we were doing. The best one was the weekly ANZ/Roy Morgan consumer confidence reading, which rose week after week until June 23 when concerns about second-wave infections in Victoria surfaced.

In the past, I’ve always added real world readings to the economic statistics that come out of the ABS, the banks and other economic research houses.

I’ve often used the number of cranes on CBD skylines to guess the health of the construction sector. I even created what I called the Dunny Index, after learning from a builder that the first thing ordered for a new building site is a Port-A-Loo, for obvious reasons. That led me to talk to equipment hiring businesses and loo-rental operations to get a handle on how the construction sector was going.

With the Coronavirus, I liked watching this consumer reading from Roy Morgan. And this was CommSec’s Ryan Felsman’s take on the numbers: “The weekly ANZ-Roy Morgan consumer confidence rating was stable at 97.5 points (long-run average since 1990 is 112.9). Confidence has only fallen once in the past 12 weeks.”

With his note of the day’s stats, Felsman used the headline: “Encouraging lift in spending and activity.” All this helps my positivity but this CBA result gives me more to be optimistic about. And it comes as vaccine talk is buoying global stock markets.

After March 23, which was the bottom of the Coronavirus crash, 2GB’s former breakfast host, Alan Jones, called me Positive Pete, because I often found indicators that were being ignored in mainstream media.

The bad news was too important for most of my media buddies but the headline I have to hail comes from today’s AFR that screams: “Resilient CBA upbeat on recovery!” (That’s my exclamation mark but it certainly deserves it! As did that one.)

Let’s look at yesterday’s 11.3% fall in cash profit, which seems small when you think about the magnitude of our economic problem, which is called the worst recession since the Great Depression. By the way, the bank still made $7.3 billion in profit.

But let me paint a picture of the positives we can take from this CBA show-and-tell:

• CBA is our biggest bank.
• It’s in the top 50 banks in the world.
• It has to have one of the best real world takes on our economy because it’s the biggest bank in the country, with the most customers.
• There’s been $100 billion of new home lending and $27 billion of new business lending from the CBA.
• One-in-five customers who froze loan repayments are now confident enough to start making payments again! That means 46,000 of the bank’s customers who deferred their loans have elected to begin making repayments by the end of July.
• “The newly confident borrowers include 19,000 home loan customers and 27,000 business loan customers,” the AFR says.
• CBA didn’t increase its provisions for COVID-19 losses, which is a big plus, even knowing the Victorian challenge.
• The bank paid 98 cents dividend, which is a lot higher than the lowest forecasted 20 cents dividend.

And what about this from the bank’s CEO Matt Comyn. “On a global basis, Australia really stands out,” he said. “The way we see Australia and New Zealand certainly on a global basis is extremely well positioned both from a health outcome perspective as well as economic.”

The media couldn’t help itself and had to make a deal out of Comyn getting paid around $4 million. But on this recent report, he’s worth it.

His predecessor Ian Narev took home $5.5 million before he departed. And J.P. Morgan’s Jamie Diamond is on $US31.5m. Lloyds’ CEO pockets 6.3m pounds and Barclays’ CEO gets 5.9m pounds.

On the bank’s showing, and considering what all our banks are doing to help the recovery process by working with all our governments, it’s time we stopped bashing the banks.

By the way, in the year of the Royal Commission into the Misconduct in the Banking Superannuation and Financial Services Industry, this was what the regular Roy Morgan survey found: “In the six months to April 2017, satisfaction with the big four banks was 80.1%, an increase of 0.2% points from March (79.9%) and well above the long-term average of 74.9% recorded since 2005.”

That says four in five of us didn’t have a significant problem with their bank, which doesn’t mean reforms weren’t needed (though they were!) but it does suggest that the amount of bank bashing that followed the Hayne Royal Commission was, at times, excessive.