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.
JKM LNG futures are still signalling gasmageddon for Australia later this year. Adjusted for an AUD at 70 cents, plus regasification costs, imported LNG will still be coming in at about $19Gj versus $12Gj today. The gas cartel will respond to LNG imports by restricting supply so that global prices become the marginal price setter.
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
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 following graphic from CoreLogic shows Australia’s housing affordability was the worst on record at the end of 2024. In particular, the dwelling value to income ratio was a record high 8.0 as of 31 December 2024, and the percentage of income required to service a median new mortgage was a record high 50.5%. A
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.
The Market Ear on the rally nobody wanted. Now what? SPX is hitting some sort of short term trend line here. We moved above the 50 day, but are still slightly below the 200 day. The death cross is still in place, but as we pointed out a few weeks ago, last time we got
The post Now what for stocks? appeared first on MacroBusiness.
Eighty-nine. That’s the magic number. It will take at least 89 cardinals to elect Pope Francis’ successor. [The author has returned to UCA News after a year away].
That’s the two-thirds supermajority of the 133 men who will enter the Sistine Chapel on 7 May for the largest conclave in history. It would have been even larger had two other cardinal-electors not been too ill to participate.