Spike in companies entering external administration

There has been a bit of chatter today on the spike in the monthly number of companies entering into external administration. The raw data comes from ASIC.

Undertaking a seasonal decomposition of this data shows that things are quite serious.

The state where the problem appears the largest is Queensland.

And the state where things are currently improving is Western Australia.

Across the jurisdictions, we have seen a through the year (TTY) growth from February 2011 to February 2012 in six of the eight in trend terms.

I'd skip the smaller states in the above chart. For example, the NT change in the above chart is on a typical count of between zero and four external administrations per month (averaging around two).

Also, given the variance in the data it is not worth looking at the growth in the seasonally adjusted or original series.