Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.
I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.
Friday night saw the release of the latest inflation figures in the US which came in relatively soft given the tariff push on consumers and importers, but it opens the door for a probable “safe” cut from the Fed in its upcoming meeting. Further talks between the Xi and Trump regimes on rare earth exports
The post Macro Morning appeared first on MacroBusiness.
Late last week, The AFR published two articles by the same author on the same day that neatly encapsulated Australia’s housing farce. First, reporter Luke Kinsella noted that all states were falling short of their agreed National Housing Accord targets, which nationally “fell 66,000 homes short of the 240,000 required to keep pace with the
The post The great housing contradiction appeared first on MacroBusiness.

Last week, the vassal governor of Australia Anthony Albanese went to the imperial court in Washington and paid tribute to King Trump in the form of a “landmark deal” for joint mining of Australian rare earth deposits. The goal is to break China’s stranglehold on these critical minerals.

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Sunday that he anticipates that China will revive substantial purchases of US soybeans for several years and will delay its expanded licensing regime for rare earths by a year and re-examine it.
Toward the end of World War II in Europe, the US government pondered a plan to not only demilitarize but also disintegrate and deindustrialize postwar Germany.
Last week saw Australia’s housing minister, Clare O’Neil, launch a propaganda campaign to distract voters from Labor’s housing failures. First, O’Neil tweeted that Labor that “for the first time in a decade, new homes are being built faster”, and that Labor is making homes more affordable by building more of them. O’Neil’s propaganda came as

Independent candidate Catherine Connolly, a long-time advocate of Irish military neutrality and a critic of NATO’s expansion and EU militarization, has won Ireland’s presidential election in a landslide.
The ballot count was still underway when Connolly’s main rival, Heather Humphreys, conceded defeat after early tallies showed her trailing by a wide margin. Preliminary results put Connolly ahead by 63% to 29%.
The latest figures on intimate partner femicide show much of a recent rise in men killing women has now been reversed, at least temporarily. Prologue: Violence against women is a bad thing, and it’s still bad even when, as the … Continue reading →
By Lucinda Jerogin, Associate Economist at CBA: It was a quiet week in Australia with a dearth of data releases. News offshore was dominated by trade headlines as US-China tensions flared and subsequently cooled. The US Government shut down continued. Next week locally all eyes will be on the all-important quarterly CPI ahead of the
The post The economic week ahead appeared first on MacroBusiness.
DXY is not going away. AUD is at the top of its recent range. CNY has given up the ghost. Gold is still vumnerable in my book. AI metals to the moon. Rio is the chosen one. EM breaking higher. Junk is back at the core but not the periphery. Yields stalled on oil. Stocks
The post Major bank: Australian dollar to keep rising appeared first on MacroBusiness.
At a time in our history when the US tells us that Australia is valued mainly for the sacrifice we are expected to make in joining its strategy against China, our Prime Minister is undermined by intelligence that is incapable of dealing with the bifurcated risk now emerging starkly.

Venezuela's President Nicolás Maduro has accused the US of "fabricating a new war", after it ordered the world's largest warship to be sent to the Caribbean.
The USS Gerald R Ford can carry up to 90 aircraft and its deployment marks a massive increase in US firepower in the region.

