Blogotariat

Wetspac with the note. Westpac Consumer Sentiment Index up 5.7% to 98.5 in August. • RBA’s third rate cut for the year provides a clear boost. • Long period of pessimism finally coming to an end. • Consumers less anxious about finances, cautiously positive on economy. • Sentiment lift broad-based, not just confined to those

The post Rate cut sends house price hopes berserk appeared first on MacroBusiness.

Amidst the release of the Reserve Bank’s August Statement on Monetary Policy and the Albanese government’s upcoming roundtable summit, the issue of productivity growth has become a source of great debate and some controversy. On Twitter (also known as X), Nationals Senator Matt Canavan posted a chart from the Australian Financial Review showing productivity growth

The post The great productivity debate appeared first on MacroBusiness.

HMC seeks $1 billion in new attempt at fund raising its Gillard-chaired energy platform, but it has narrowed its development focus to wind and battery storage.

At the end of 2024, Australian rental affordability was tracking a record low, according to Cotality (formerly Corelogic), with the median household required to spend 31% of their income on renting the median home. Cotality’s latest quarterly rental also reported that national median rents have risen by 43% over the last five years, causing the average

Last night was all about geopolitics with an absence of economic releases for markets to pivot on, the result being a staid session on Wall Street and across the Atlantic as European stocks pulled back slightly. Markets are waiting for the Jackson Hole conference later in the week with the USD pushing slightly higher overnight

The post Macro Morning appeared first on MacroBusiness.

Transgrid predicts a "tipping point" for the grid as households embrace rooftop PV, minimum demand falls to zero and renewables race to 90 pct share by 2035.

It’s been a 60-year quest to take Timor’s oil and gas. An invasion didn’t get it. Spying didn’t get it. So now Australia is waiting them out. Former senator Rex Patrick reports from the streets of Dili.In 1969, Australia granted five exploration permits for petroleum over parts of the seabed in the Timor Sea that lay closer to the coast of Portuguese Timor than to the coast of Australia. Portugal formally protested, but events overtook things.

If it weren’t so serious, it would be laughable. A code of conduct for a writers’ festival?

Yet that was the requirement asked of authors if they wanted, after having been invited, to take part in one section of the Bendigo Writers Festival. Understandably, many refused and did not attend.

Warwick McFadyen

Just over a year ago, I wrote a piece about the 2012 discovery of a group of early hominins, the Denisovans, from a cave in Siberia. All that was initially found was a finger bone, from which was extracted some DNA, which showed the owner as not belonging to the Neanderthals. This finger bone belonged to the first group of archaic humans to be revealed solely by their DNA and associated proteins, rather than the morphology of their fossilised bones. Subsequently another sample of Denisovan DNA was extracted from another specimen from the same cave1.

I'm making a note to myself—and maybe a quiet public declaration—that I will never cook traditional Bolognese sauce on a workday again. I have my own recipe, of course, because it's the national dish of Australia, so there are already about 25 million-plus variations on the traditional Bolognese ragu. It normally takes me about an hour to cook my version, but Jane wanted me to follow the Marcella Hazan recipe, which I knew involved three hours of simmering. I figured I’d put it together over lunch and just let it cook through the afternoon.

Yeah, nah, not so much.

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky could bring the fighting with Russia to a halt “immediately” by agreeing to a settlement that rules out NATO membership and entails territorial concessions, US President Donald Trump has said.

According to a 2022 survey conducted by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Indian migrants much prefer Labor to the Coalition. The survey suggested that in the 2022 federal election, Indian migrants voted 58:34 for Labor over the Coalition. Chinese-Australians also appear to prefer Labor. The Tally Room discovered that in the 2022 federal election,

The post Why Labor will double down on Indian migration appeared first on MacroBusiness.

Big batteries are displacing plans for peaking gas generators, even those that are fully permitted, because they're cheaper and faster to build.