Blogotariat

The European Union, that grand and failing dream of technocrats, is dying. Its decline is not sudden or dramatic but a slow unraveling, a bureaucratic collapse in which every policy designed to sustain it only hastens its demise.

On Tuesday, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released dwelling approvals data for March, which recorded an 8.8% monthly fall to 15,220 approvals. House approvals fell by 4.5% in March, while unit & apartment approvals fell by 15.1%. Annual approvals rose to 180,740, up 10% on the June 2024 low of 164,254. As illustrated below,

The post Australia’s housing target decimated again appeared first on MacroBusiness.

For tonight’s update, I’m going to first touch on the races I included in this morning’s post and how they have changed. Those are the seats that are conventional close races.

Then I will turn my focus to the seats where the two-candidate-preferred count has been recalibrated to a different pair of candidates. In these seats there has been some significant progress today towards resolving these seats.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_oW5B0uh0n8Massive Escalation: Russia Announced that NATO Launched Preparations for Seizure of KALININGRAD

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

The post Macro Afternoon: 6 May 2025 appeared first on MacroBusiness.

I spent most of the election weekend down in Sydney, finishing a book in my hotel room and giving a talk at that architecture conference.

It went very well, thank you.

Both the talk—and, of course, the election.

It had been a while since I’d spent much time in the centre of Sydney. When I go down, I usually stay out at Bondi—my old hood. But I hadn’t been in the city proper for any serious stretch of time since the light rail went into George Street, and I was really surprised by how much of a difference it’s made to the CBD.

Like, completely transformed it.

It is one thing to have targets, it is quite another to achieve them. Chris Bowen, should he continue as climate and energy minister, has a lot on his plate.

Perth-headquartered manufacturer lands deal to supply clear solar glass for a high-rise building undergoing a $A308m facelift in the centre of Sydney.

I reported last week on the latest results from Realestate.co.nz, showing that the national average asking price of homes listed on the site declined for the second consecutive month in April to $851,746, down 3.8% from $884,995 in February. The decline in prices was attributed to a growing glut of homes listed for sale, which

The post New Zealand’s house price crash steepens appeared first on MacroBusiness.

The ferrous complex is still struggling. Forgive some of the delayed pricing on the chart. SGX is sitting around $96. The latest CISA output data looks more like 2022 than 2024. Though I have to caution that this series has broken down versus official output somewhat this year. The challenges remain. Goldman. The Chinese government’s

The post Iron ore enters the danger zone appeared first on MacroBusiness.

The first term of the Albanese government saw net overseas migration to Australia surge to a record high. It also saw temporary visa numbers balloon nearly 500,000 higher than the pre-pandemic peak: Total international student enrolments also hit a record high of nearly 1.1 million at the end of 2024, nearly 250,000 higher than the

The post Indian students and migration agents celebrate Labor victory appeared first on MacroBusiness.

From Goldman: From a macro perspective, we leave our forecasts for Australia unchanged given the outcome was not a surprise and the ALP’spost-Budget policy announcements have been fairly modest (0.0-0.1% of GDP). We note most of the policies announced in the Budget on 25 March, including income tax cuts for households, have already been legislated.

The post Labor win immaterial for rate cuts appeared first on MacroBusiness.

NAB chief economist Sally Auld has predicted heavy interest rate cuts this year, beginning with a 0.50% cut at the 20 May meeting. “We expect the RBA to cut by 50bps in May, followed by 25bps in July, August, November and February”, Auld wrote in her May update. “With the current setting of monetary policy

The post Will the RBA rain rate cuts? appeared first on MacroBusiness.