Blogotariat

Friday night saw a very hesitant risk complex trying to digest the recent Bank of England and Swiss Central Bank meetings, while trying to anticipate what the Fanta Fuhrer in the Oval Office is going to do next with tariffs. Wall Street initially pulled back slightly in line with European stocks before rebounding later in

The post Macro Morning appeared first on MacroBusiness.

Response to the latest Israeli/US slaughter in Gaza shows the world’s citizens looking into a moral precipice. How will they act? Will they ponder the principles of humanitarian law let alone ideals of a common humanity?

Can there exist any citizens who support Israeli/US brutalities and the cowardly complicity of Western governments, including Australia’s? If so, will they please step forward.

Harry Ottley, economist at CBA, published a terrific set of charts showing the explosion in non-market jobs, where there is often a lack of market prices and wages are heavily subsidised by the government, and the implications for Australia’s labour productivity. Ottley shows that in the year to Q4 2024, the number of employed persons

The post Australia is sowing the seeds of a productivity disaster appeared first on MacroBusiness.

The Department of Education released data on the number of international students studying in Australia. A record 1.095 million international students were enrolled in Australia at the end of December 2024. This was up around 150,000 from the pre-COVID peak in 2019 and around 500,000 higher than a decade ago. International student commencements also hit

Households are guaranteed a further $150 in energy bill rebates after the Coalition immediately matched Labor’s budget commitment, despite describing the support as a “Band-Aid to a bullet wound” of high power prices.

The decline in religion is something that interests me greatly, as anyone who reads this blog can attest. I originally wrote about in in 2019, with an essay on the decline of religion in the Anglophone world, wherein I tracked the proportion of the population who, according to the census, had no religious affiliation. In 1966, only 0.8% of the population reportedly had no religious affiliation whereas, at the time the last census for which data was available (i.e. that of 2016), indicated that 30.1% of the population had no religious affiliation1.

A New York Times report on Thursday is either fake or people at the FBI or CIA ran to the paper to undermine their boss, though there’s no real reason both can’t be true.

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Australia’s hydrogen strategy has been a mix of ambition, overreach, and slow reality checks.

Russia’s diplomacy chief, Sergey Lavrov has had to deal with eight US secretaries of state, impressing almost all of them. Let’s have a glimpse at his track record with US diplomats.

WHEN SVANTE ARRHENIUS DID HIS CALCULATIONS IN THE LATE 19TH CENTURY, HE PREDICTED THAT THE AMOUNT OF CO2 RELEASED INTO THE ATMOSPHERE BY THE INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION STARTED 50 YEARS EARLIER WAS ENOUGH TO RAISE GLOBAL TEMPERATURES BY ABOUT 2 (TWO) DEGREES CELSIUS. 

WAS HE CORRECT?

Retired Royal Navy Rear Admiral Chris Parry stated that Russia would not be able to defend itself against a massive ICBM strike.

"One Trident submarine has the ability to incinerate 40 Russian cities very quickly. That is a lot of food for thought for Putin and that should make any world leader fearful," he told The Telegraph.

The big news on house insurance this week was the response of the insurance industry’s peak body to a parliamentary committee’s extensive criticisms of its treatment of people claiming on their policies after the massive floods of 2022.

Broken promises and burned pipelines: Why diplomacy with Kiev is a dead endUkraine blew up a Russian gas facility just days after a mutual agreement not to do just that. As if anyone expected something different.

By Nadezhda Romanenko

In a brazen act of duplicity, Ukraine has once again demonstrated that it is not a reliable partner for diplomacy – let alone peace.