Having admitted to entirely ‘cooking the books’ with its jobs data, it appears Australian authorities are going full kitchen-sink and ‘allowing’ all the dismally honest data out to the market (we assume in some desperate PR need to justify their next monetary policy experiment). Building Approvals fell 7.5% MoM in January, crashing 15.5% YoY (5 standard deviations below expectations)  – the biggest drop since April 2012 (and the 3rd month in a row of declines).

Sudden collapse…

This was below the lowest economist’s estimate and was in fact a 5-sigma miss…

So why come clean now about the state of the housing bubble? As we noted when RBA admitted its fudged jobs data,

Simple: weakness in commodity prices “is far greater than people had been expecting,” Fraser said in earlier remarks to the panel. Australia is now “swimming against the tide” because of uncertainties in the global economy, he added.

Translation: “we need more easing, and to do that, the economy has to go from strong to crap.”

And with the Australian economy suddenly desperate for lower rates from the RBA, one can ignore the propaganda lies, and focus once again on the far uglier truth.