Financial flows are proving a handy, and even reliable, indicator of the present state of demand and investment in the economy.
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review of economic indicators based on payment flows by the Reserve Bank of Australia found that several indicators were useful in economic analysis.
A new indicator, from SWIFT - a banking utility that processes cross-border payments - earned the most praise from the RBA.
Earlier this year, SWIFT released an index that helps to predict GDP growth in OECD countries.
The latest SWIFT forecast, released this week, projects annual growth across OECD economies at 1.1 per cent in the June 2012 quarter and 1.0 per cent in the September 2012 quarter.
The RBA said SWIFT payments track changes in gross domestic product and gross national expenditure "reasonably well".
The RBA also noted that "interestingly, the number, rather than the value, of payments is more highly correlated with economic activity.
"This may be because volatility in the values series is affected by large financial transactions, such as swaps, which are not directly relevant for measuring economic output and demand."
The RBA said that adding SWIFT's payments data to versions of its economic models helped explain an additional 10 to 30 per cent of the quarterly movement in the broad measures of economic activity.
Retail payments data are another source of data on trends in spending.
One such source is the RBA's own monthly data on retail payments, published six weeks after the end of the month to which it relates.
The RBA said this data "appear to be of some use in providing a timely read on official measures of domestic demand."
Three banks - ANZ, CBA and NAB - produce regular measures of spending based on each bank's own transaction flows across debit cards and credit cards.
The RBA said that while its own retail payments data was "somewhat more correlated with most official measures of activity", CBA's monthly data was "more correlated with real retail sales".