Blogotariat

International Reading: DOGE worker admits the government works fine and was hoping for more easy wins. – Futurism What has Elon Musk’s Doge actually achieved? – FT Mike Johnson Argues Congress Needs Stock Trading to ‘Support Their Families’ Due to ‘Frozen’ Salaries – Latin Times GOP civil war breaks out over Medicaid as right calls

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AUD/USD EUR/USD USD/JPY GBP/USD Gold WTI Brent Australia 200 US S&P 500 UK 100 Japan 225        

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NSW energy minister Penny Sharpe on the challenges in transitioning Australia's biggest coal grid to renewables in 15 years. Plus: News of the week, and new leaders.

Australia has too many cafes, and many will need to close down. According to IBIS World, over 27,000 cafes and coffee shops operate in Australia. Competition is fierce, with multiple cafes often operating at the same locations. And there isn’t enough consumer demand to sustain them. Australian households are caught in a cost-of-living crisis. Real

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Energy policy in Australia has long suffered at the hands of a simple lie being easier to accept than a complex truth.

Queensland environmental lawyer turned federal Senator says the Greens remains dedicated to its core "green" values and is keen to work with Labor to "get shit done."

Exorbitant land costs are the fundamental driver behind Australia’s expensive housing. During 2023-24, the residential land values that underpin the housing market grew by 8.8%, reaching a valuation of $7.7 trillion. Over the 35 years to 2023–24, residential land values skyrocketed from 1.1 to 2.9 times Australia’s GDP. In contrast, aggregate structure values only increased

More pain from The Market Ear. After the China/US trade talks JPM’s great derivatives team dives in: “The China-US trade talks in Geneva have been more positive than anticipated and have resulted in a normalization of the volatility spread between the S&P 500 and European indices. We recommend buying SPX short-dated calls, fully funded by selling

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DXY is taking a breather. That could not help the AUD. No lead boots. Gold up. Metals down. Big miners still look fugly. EM stocks hit resistance. Junk says no problemo. Yields eased. Stocks mixed. TS Lombard sounds about right today. The US-China truce removes major USD downside risk. The significant de-escalation in trade tensions

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Australian households are experiencing their longest recession in generations. The Q4 national accounts released in March showed that real per capita home consumption declined for the eighth consecutive quarter. A sharp dip in household incomes is driving the decline in consumption. As shown below, as of Q4 2024, real per capita household consumption had fallen

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Tasmania flew under the radar in the lead up to the recent election, because of the lack of state polling in Tasmania. It was a “known unknown” to quote Donald Rumsfeld, and I do remember commenting that we didn’t know how things were going in Tasmania, but still we did not know. This did create space for some fevered commenters on this website to confidently assert that Labor was on track to be badly beaten, but now we know better.

Cotality (formerly CoreLogic) reported that the total value of Australia’s housing stock was $11.3 trillion as of April 30, 2025, with the average home worth exactly $1 million. New research from Cotality shows that a record 34.4% of homes across the nation were valued above $1 million in April, with 41.6% of capital city homes

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