to our second video following the roundup of the economy in 2019. This is our forecast

for the Australian economy in 2020. We asked our panel of 40 leading experts and economists

in Australia, how likely or unlikely they think 12 different scenarios are to happen

in the next year. We're looking at everything from the housing market to jobs to the Australian

dollar to the economy. In this video, we will round up our forecast for the year 2020. First

up is the housing market. We asked economists whether they expect the pretty dramatic house

price increases we've seen towards the end of 2019, if they expect those to increase

and continue through 2020 or if they expect this is a dead cat bounce of this is a blip

on the graph? House prices of currency collapse back next year. In other words, we asked them

if the highest price increases are stainable? 52% of economists told us that they think

it's likely that house prices will increase to beyond where they were in 2019 in 2020.

More interestingly that when we asked economists how likely it is that prices will fall, then

only 12% of economists told us that it was likely house prices will fall in 2020. So

the general forecast from economist is positive when it comes to house prices, whether that

will actually happen, where we need to watch this space. Well, we also ask them about mortgage

defaults. And this is when people can't pay back their home loan and have to get into

trouble with the bank. We've seen a slight increase in the percentage of Australians

facing mortgage defaults in 2019. We asked economists how likely it is that that's going

to increase again in 2020. And 78% said it was unlikely so we're looking at a comfortable

enough year for Australian borrowers. The second thing we looked at the housing market

was the federal government's new plan to make it easier for first time buyers to get on

the housing ladder basis. If you're buying for the first time you normally need a 20%

deposit, but the federal government as part of the election, promised have introduced

a scheme to get first homebuyers on the ladder with only a 5% deposit. Now that should lead

to more borrowers in the market. You would think that would have an impact on the market,

but maybe not so much we asked economists do they think this will have any significant

impact on the market? 90% of them said they did not expect it to really have any impact

at all. Now, one of the big reasons here is the borrowing limits the government is putting

on the availability of the loans to consumers. For example, in Sydney, you cannot buy a house

for more than 700 K to qualify for these 5% borrowing loans. Now as you know, in Sydney,

you can barely get a parking space for that in many areas. And we have a table on the

screen here we'll just show you the limits you can borrow in various different cities

and states across the country. As you can see they're quite low, so not many people

are going to qualify for this scheme. Finally, we asked economists where they would invest

their money if they had to buy a house in any of the capital cities in Australia. Where

would they invest the money in 2020, Brisbane and Melbourne came out on top, Sydney place

relatively low, which is usually the star of the Australian housing market. So you know,

that was where economists would place their money. If you're going to invest, you might

need to consider those cities watch this space to see how those prices grow. And if they

do. We have seen the employment figures in Australia the jobs figures full over the last

while and it's not looking too good there. When we asked economists how likely it is

that the employment figures will continue to fall, 64% of them told us that it is likely

we will continue to see them fall. In jobs, we've also seen wage growth slowing in 2019.

So the amount of money people get paid is increasing at a slower rate. We asked economists

whether that will continue to drop in 2020. And they said no, 70% of economists around

that said that wage growth will not continue to slow next year. So if that's true, you

know, the majority of Australians could be looking at slightly more money in their pay

packet. Well, we also ask them about retail. Now we've seen a very difficult year for retailers

in Australia we've seen some large, higher end retailers struggling we've seen a big

shift online, a big shift to overseas purchasing to with people like Amazon launching in the

Australian marketing and sucking up that online customer. Well, we asked economist if new

car sales are going to fall in Australia, these are generally a good barometer of a

healthy economy. They fall in recently, but it was bit 50-50. In terms of weather economists

think they're going to fall in the future. But on top of that, we also asked them how

likely it was that retail sales would recover next year. In this case, we've got nearly

70% of economists expecting some sort of recovery. So that could be a good thing for potential

retailers in the market.

When it comes to the Aussie dollar, well, it's been dropping in value of light and that's

going to continue when we asked economists whether the Aussie dollar will continue to

drop in value in 2020, 80% of them said they do expect it to continue to decline. So that

means less value for Australians travelling overseas, maybe you want to have your holiday

at home, put more money in the Australian economy. Second thing we're looking at here

is quantitative easing, which are called QE, because quantitative easing is pretty difficult

to say. This is basically what central banks do when they run out of options, and aren't

getting any results and boost in the economy from causing cash rates like the idea has

been doing when this happens. And option that's open to banks, which we've seen happen in

the US and in the EU is called QE, where they basically print money and pump it into the

economy in order to stimulate the economy, then withdraw that money further down the

line. Now we've been asking economists how likely it is we'll see QE in 2020. And the

number of economists saying it's likely has gone up and up and up. Now it's about half

of economists that could very well the on the cards. One of the other ways we could

go instead of introducing QE is to go to a zero percent. Contract currently contract

all the way down to zero. That will be three more cuts on top of the three we've seen,

but economists think that only be 73% of them are saying they do not expect to see a zero

percent cash rate next year. This is kind of backed up by the RBA who've also indicated

they don't favour cash, right? And they would probably favour or QE if it did get to that.

And finally, we're gonna look at the big one. How likely is a recession in Australia in

2020? We've done two videos on this looking at the arguments for and against a recession

happening at 2020 links to those in the description. But when we asked economists the results were

strongly against the likelihood of recession, only 9% of economists said they expected a

recession was likely in 2020. Interestingly, when we asked the public so we've got 40 economists

we also surveyed 7000 Australians, half of them think that a recession is likely. If

you looked at the videos we produced the video with the argument for recession has many more

views of the video against so this definitely appetite for recession among the public but

not among the people in the know. So that's our roundup of 2020. Lots of links in the

description more information on those. You can follow my insights blog on finder for

more info on the economy in 2020. Stay with us next year to find out how we go on this

rollercoaster ride. If you're interested in getting involved with the conversation, tell

us what your forecast is for 2020. What do you expect to see in the Australian economy

next year? Comments below we'll see if we can get a conversation going