Hi all, A quick note to offer guidance on the new website. As well as the layout changes that make it easier to access content for new readers, it comes with a dramatically improved sign-up and resubscription process, greatly enhanced speed, and a much better mobile experience (since 95% of traffic is now phone!). The
Tonight I’ll appear on DFA Live with Martin North from 8.00pm AEST, where we will dive into the dramatic falls in home prices and whether this signals a broader malaise in Australia’s economy. If so, what can be done about it, and how should households prepare for a potential recession? You can ask a question
National Australia Bank (NAB) recently announced plans to cut 2,500 jobs by mid-2027, including 1,500 by the end of this year. However, NAB has now revealed it plans to abolish 3,200 jobs before Christmas, although it will invite some displaced staff to apply for new jobs through a process known as ‘spill-and-fill’. A senior NAB manager has likened
News is leading the charge, oddly. Design graduate Harriet Lindsay has spent nearly a year emailing, calling and applying – but she still can’t land a job after spending $25,000 to obtain her UTS degree. After contacting about 200 design firms across Australia, the 23-year-old from Sydney’s Northern Beaches is starting to wonder whether she
If the latest opinion polls are accurate, the Victorian Labor government faces a crushing defeat at November’s state election. The latest Newspoll reported by The Australian suggests Victoria’s political landscape has shifted dramatically ahead of the 28 November election, with the Coalition holding a commanding lead over Labor. Labor’s primary vote has fallen 4 points
The Godzilla El Nino just keeps growing. BOM animation. There’s no stopping it. Here are the strongest El Niños on record compared to today. UBS pulls no punches. Strongest El Niño in more than 75 years According to the expert, the current El Niño is unequivocally the strongest observed since modern sea surface temperature monitoring
Coolabah Capital’s Chris Joye has posted the following chart on X (Twitter) showing that the current “crash” in Australian dwelling values is “officially the worst ever”: “Current Aussie housing crash is the worst ever recorded since 1980 – national capital city prices are currently falling at a 16% annualised pace based on the last three
TME asks the question. DB nailed the tech unwind. Now what? Credit where it’s due. On October 9, Deutsche Bank’s Binky Chadha and team tactically downgraded tech from overweight to neutral, warning of an unfavorable risk/reward setup and a potential sharp reversal. The timing was excellent. Mega-cap growth and tech have since fallen 7%, while
War headlines today. Another ship on fire in Hormuz. Iran seeks peace with Mecca partners. IDF chief resists Netanyahu’s order to attack Iran. Dated Brent is still climbing. Both Brent futures and diesel eased, but this is now a weekly pattern of down on Monday and new highs by Friday. Oil flows out of the
In recent times, One Nation and its leader Pauline Hanson have gained an incredible amount of ground in the polls, rising to often top the polls on primary vote. The genesis of the move from the relative backwater ground of a long time minor party to battling as an equal among the major’s has been
Last week’s ultra-hawkish commentary from RBA deputy governor Andrew Hauser immediately sent expectations of interest rate hikes among economists and in financial markets skyward. Hauser’s central message was that inflation is proving more persistent and “materially worse” than expected, inflation expectations are beginning to drift higher, and the RBA remains prepared to tighten policy further.
CoreWeave’s debt problems raise a question that matters well beyond its shareholders: Is Coreweave a loose thread that can be snapped with little damage? Or will it be the thread that unravels the entire fabric of the AI trade? At the moment, I think it is more the former. And my expectation is that if
Australia’s housing market is facing its largest price correction in living memory. Cotality’s daily dwelling values index has plummeted by 7.6% since early April across the five major capital cities, led by Sydney, where values have fallen by 9.8%. Values continue to fall at a furious pace, down 4.2% over the past quarter: At this
Goldman has been pretty good on the Chinese property crash, being more bearish than most. But it’s not been bearish enough. China’s property downturn is now in its sixth year. While we had projected then property sector’s drag to real GDP growth to narrow somewhat from last year to this year, most housing activity indicators
Australia’s university system has become a marketing scam that lures full-fee-paying international students while minimising wages for rank-and-file teaching staff. Universities have become less focused on academia and teaching, instead treating education like a profit-maximising private corporation that enriches vice-chancellors and senior management. The federal government has aided and abetted this transformation into degree factories
TME has a fantastic wrap today. One horseman short of an apocalypse Three horsemen are already riding through global markets. Each brings a different threat, and none is particularly welcome at this stage of the cycle. One horseman short of an apocalypse — but three may be more than enough. 1 – The oil horseman
When former Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull first announced the Snowy Hydro 2.0 pumped hydro project in 2017, it was billed as a $2 billion project capable of producing 2.2 gigawatts of power on demand and 350 gigawatt-hours of storage by 2021. Snowy Hydro 2.0 has been delayed several times since its announcement. The project’s
Iron ore futures were stable Friday, but steel is breaking. HRC is at 18-month lows. My freight-adjusted CFR iron ore price has fallen again as C5 bounces. We are hovering around $82. Iron ore inventories are stable. Steel inventories are finally down slightly YOY. Steel demand sucks. Steel production sucks even more. China’s poo brown
War headlines over the weekend: US nearly attacks Iran, backs off. More shipping attacks in Hormuz. Dated Brent is surging again. Brent and diesel futures soared Friday on the fear of weekend attacks and have crashed this morning. CTAs have room to run. LNG to the moon. Windward reports that roughly half of the recent
Over the years, weekend property auction results have become a key barometer the media uses to illustrate the housing market’s strength at a given moment. For decades, it has mostly been a relatively rosy indicator, with headlines about record prices frequently appearing in the nation’s financial and property-focused mainstream media. But amid the current downturn,
Recent Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) commentary on inflation and interest rates has been inconsistent, leading to wide swings in interest rate expectations. When the RBA Board delivered its interest rate decision last month, its commentary was unambiguously hawkish. The Board unanimously lifted the cash rate by 25 bp to 4.60%, identified inflation as its
Dusk in Paris last week Photo By Jorge Jaramillo – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, commons.wikimedia.org The signs are all about us. Unhappy people; continents full of them, feeble democratic and institutional processes, and a mainstream media which has lost the ability to tell us what is and why and seems steeped in selling us
I recently had a conversation with Cameron Murray about the economics of an ageing population, and some of his arguments challenged the way we usually think about demographics. The common narrative is that an older population means fewer workers, more retirees, and an increasingly unsustainable burden on government finances. Murray offered a different interpretation: perhaps
By Deep T Our recent articles questioning Australia’s superannuation system have focused on a simple proposition: a system controlling nearly $5 trillion of Australians’ wealth deserves considerably more scrutiny than it receives. We have examined ten reasons the existing compulsory superannuation model should be looked at. We have also proposed a parallel alternative — a
In the long history of Australia’s housing prices, intervention to support housing prices from the government or the Reserve Bank has never been far away from the market when prices were falling significantly. From first home buyers grants to support the market during the Global Financial Crisis to repeated crash dives in interest rates, a
International Reading: Peter Thiel’s Roth IRA grew from $1,700 to $5 billion — leaked tax records reveal how the tech billionaire may never owe a dime on it – Money Wise Elon Musk accused of trying to ‘buy Texas’ as he pours millions into Ken Paxton’s campaign – The Express The Bill for Trumpism Comes
