As long as I live I know one thing for certain: the Yanks will always shock me! Need to know why? Well try this: the country followed The Simpsons script of 17 years ago and made Donald Trump President! In fact, the cartoon predicted it 17 times until it actually happened! But over the weekend, the US shocked the world with a jobs report that was wrong by 10.5 million jobs!

This is the biggest economic miscalculation in my 35 years of public commentary. And because economists negatively predicted an 8 million job loss in May and the number turned out to be a 2.5 million jobs gain, it not only raised doubts about the quality of US number crunchers’ crystal balls, it also screams that the US economic collapse has been exaggerated!

The smart writers of The Simpsons never saw this coming!

This good US news may well raise such positive possibilities for us here in Australia, which is bound to show up in the stock market today. The dollar anticipated it and it’s now over 70US cents. And bank stocks should have a good day, provided the consensus view agrees that there is a really good chance that the great jobs news in the States could easily be seen here as well.

Economists are crying “unfair” with these numbers and the US Labour Department admits there are errors because of the unusual situation all economies are in, thanks to the Coronavirus. Economists argue that “millions of people appeared to be erroneously classified by the survey as not working but employed,” CBC.com reports. “These people should have been classified as on temporary layoff and therefore unemployed. Had they been counted correctly, the jobless rate would have been roughly three points higher — 16 per cent, the government said.”

But even if you allow for that, economists had tipped unemployment would go from 14.5% to 20%, so the 16% jobless number is a strong case against the exaggerated negativity on the outlook for the US economy.

As an economist who has speculated that maybe our economic forecasts have been too negative, I can’t wait for the May unemployment/employment report out on Thursday week. That said, I’ve always sweated on seeing the June report (which won’t come out until mid-July) because that should show the return-to-the-office effect. I’ve pretty well ignored the economic stats lately as they all should be bad because the virus plus the Government’s lockdown and closures policy has made it so.

What I want to see is all economic data that comes to light as we reopen the economy, so I can gauge how quickly the economy will rebound.

In late March (only two and a quarter months ago), we were told by the Treasurer to get ready for a six months hibernation of the economy. People actually thought that their businesses and jobs would be put to sleep for six months!

And here we are in June and the Treasurer is killing free childcare, reintroducing the childcare subsidies on July 12 and killing JobKeeper for the childcare sector on July 19. This looks like a live experiment of possibly a progressive dropping of the JobKeeper wage subsidy, which was supposed to last until September.

The Treasury team will be watching the upcoming data and especially the unemployment number next week, and then for the month after, to see if the life-support measures for the economy can be removed gradually.

I was surprised how good the April job numbers were, with employment falling by a record 594,300 positions but the unemployment rate only went from 5.2 to 6.2%.

In contrast, the US the jobless rate went from 4.4% to 14.7% from March to April, so we’re already showing that the Coronavirus hasn’t hit us as hard. And there are some other indicators that gives me good reason to be hopeful that being optimistic on Australia isn’t too crazy.

I like the fact that the weekly ANZ-Roy Morgan consumer confidence rating rose by 6% to 98.3 points and now sentiment has lifted for nine successive weeks (the longest stretch on record) since hitting record lows of 65.3 points on March 29. It shows the consumer is liking what they’re seeing in relation to the economy, the infection news and their personal financial outlooks.

On national house prices, CoreLogic's monthly index shows that prices fell an average of 0.4%, which hardly suggests there is recession-like panic out there. Melbourne was down 0.9% and Sydney gave up a small 0.4% but some cities actually saw gains! Check out the chart above from CoreLogic.

Anyone who wants to see another optimistic view on property and the economy should check out our recent Switzer TV Property, where Chris Joye delights in saying he is “hunting property bears!”

And what about the positivity from the stock market? We have rebounded 32% since our March 23 low on the S&P/ASX 200 Index and it’s bound to go higher today.

The fact that the Government is planning to take away free childcare by July 12 and the related JobKeeper for the childcare sector on July 19, means they think a lot of workers will be getting back to normal, going back to work and doing what they used to do before that damn virus came to town.

Of course, this is the best-case scenario but who would’ve thought the Kiwis would be COVID-19 free by now? Best-case scenarios are possible and can have a huge positive economic stimulus effect, when doomsday merchants have been in control when a pandemic is declared.

It’s all understandable. Now we have to pray that infection rates don’t spoil this accumulating great news that will be very positive for economic growth, job creation, confidence and stock, as well as property prices.

And why do I seem so excited? Well, apart from the good stuff listed in the paragraph above, recall that the worst-case unemployment forecast for our economy was 10%. That’s over 1.2 million Australians out of work and what that means to their family, their self-respect and then the economy.

You have to hope that we optimists are on the money, don’t you? Not even The Simpsons could find anything funny about 1.2 million Aussies out of work.