Australia’s federal budget uses two main deficit measures, and they differ because they treat certain transactions differently—especially asset sales, loans, and off‑budget funds. The headline balance captures all cash flows in and out of the Commonwealth government, including: day‑to‑day spending tax revenue capital spending asset purchases and sales loans issued and repaid equity injections transactions
As usual, this is all sound and fury signifying nothing. Grace Tame has stolen the limelight from the very cause she espouses. She is now on the defensive. “I’m not the story…The story is that Israel stands accused by the International Criminal Court of committing genocide in Gaza, and so far”… “This should terrify us
Australia’s rental market has experienced record-tight vacancy rates and explosive rental growth over the past five years. The nation’s vacancy rate fell to a record low of 1.5% in September 2025 and, as of January 2026, was tracking at 1.7%—well below the pre-COVID level: Cotality’s latest weekly indicators report shows that the number of rental
We all know that the RBA can’t forecast its way out of a wet paper bag. Yesterday, we got a swag of soft data evidence that it has, once again, nailed the top of the economy with a rate hike. The CBA employment tracker continued to show a decline in monthly job creation. 21k per
The Pulse’s Ross Elliott has written an excellent article on the administrative bloat that has engulfed Australia’s planning industry. Elliott notes that lawyers he has spoken with told him “they didn’t really know how many [planning-related] pages of rules and regulations were now in force—just that it would be so many as to be impossible
The ferrous jaws may have partially closed, but a new problem is fast emerging: the price of steel amid weak demand. More profitable steel, or less loss-making steel, means more of it and lower prices, which leads to lower iron ore prices in a rinse-and-repeat cycle. ANZ has a new report that is worth considering
A new era has dawned in Japan with the reelection of Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s government. A Japan that is tough on China and strict on immigration has emerged, one that is unafraid of defending its interests both foreign and domestic. Prime Minister Takaichi’s Liberal Democratic Party won in an absolute landslide, securing a 10.77
The Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) February Statement of Monetary Policy (SoMP) forecast that trimmed mean inflation would rise in the near term to 3.7% and would remain above the midpoint of the RBA’s 2% to 3% target band until the end of 2028. The RBA also assumed that the official cash rate would rise
Silver surfed a massive wave, then wiped out. But it remains a long way above long-term prices. Is there a new paradigm for silver, or are we heading back to its long term real price of sub-$20? Background on metals pricing For most industrial metals, like iron or copper, the long-term commodity price is the
The Reserve Bank of Australia’s (RBA) latest forecasts, contained in the February Statement of Monetary Policy (SoMP), show that real gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to grow by just 1.6% in the year to June 2028. This is the central bank’s lowest medium-term growth outlook since it began releasing forecasts in 1990. Stephen Smith