Blogotariat

Westpac says maybe. Retail sales posted another solid rise in November, up 0.8%mth. While annual growth is at 3.0%yr, nominal sales have tracked a 6% annual pace since April. Black Friday sales provided a clear boost to non food sectors. The November result likely understates this boost given the later timing of the event in

The post Is the Aussie consumer back? appeared first on MacroBusiness.

If there is a more intellectually bankrupt political force in Australia than the Fake Left, I have yet to find it. On the one hand, The Greens, Labor and their media cheerleaders demand ever-higher immigration while complaining about the direct fallout from it. It could take almost a decade for the average Victorian renter who

The post Fake Left delivers housing disaster to its base appeared first on MacroBusiness.

The gas import catastrophe begins this year. The chief executive of the country’s most advanced LNG import venture has rejected findings by the competition watchdog that gas consumers in southern states will be slugged with higher prices as they start to rely on imported fuel as early as 2026. …“We strongly reject the assumption that

The post Gas imports to deliver massive inflation shock appeared first on MacroBusiness.

The past 20 years have seen a proliferation of cafes around Australia. When I moved to the Melbourne suburb of Ashburton in 2006, there were only a few cafes on the High Street shopping strip. In the years leading up to the pandemic, the number of cafes on or near the High Street strip increased

The post $7 coffees trigger cafe collapse appeared first on MacroBusiness.

DXY is still poised for higher. AUD is now trading in the 61s. CNY was smashed by deflation. Gold is marking time. Oil has lost its mojo. Copper pop! Miner not! EM cactus. Junk is weighing everything down. As the yield bear steepening continues. Stocks were shut. Check this out. The Chinese long-bond yield is

The post Australian dollar plunges into 61s appeared first on MacroBusiness.

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky could press criminal charges against former Army Commander-in-Chief Valery Zaluzhny, should he decide to run for the presidency, Kiev-based Telegraf reported on Wednesday. Zelensky has refused to hold elections or leave office after he cancelled a vote scheduled for May 2024, citing the conflict with Russia. A new election date has yet to be set.

The EU Commission plans to deploy a large team of experts and officials to monitor Elon Musk’s upcoming live interview with the co-chair of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, Alice Weidel, Politico reported on Thursday.

The event, which is scheduled for Thursday evening, could give the AfD an “unfair advantage” ahead of next month's snap parliamentary elections in Germany, Brussels believes, according to the media outlet.

I was kind of incredulous reading this long piece in PC Mag from a guy who’d used AI to generate his own version of Zombies Run.

He basically turned his workouts into an immersive audio story. So, imagine instead of just doing burpees or planks, you’re the main character in some epic adventure using, er, burpees and planks to defeat SPECTRE… or something. He used Perplexity.ai to research and design the workouts, then ChatGPT to turn the exercises into a story.

View from Red Rock Lookout, Alvie VIC   AUD/USD   EUR/USD   USD/JPY   GBP/USD   Gold   WTI   Brent   Australia 200   US S&P 500   UK 100   Japan 225   Easy Listening      

The post Macro Afternoon: 9 January 2025 appeared first on MacroBusiness.

The ANZ is getting dovish. The November monthly CPI indicator points to downside risk to our and the RBA’s Q4 trimmed mean CPI forecasts (both 0.7% q/q and 3.4% y/y). This raises the probability of a February rate cut, although the resilience in the labour market (noted in the RBA’s December minutes from 24 December)

The post Indian stampede to deliver February rate cut? appeared first on MacroBusiness.

Join us in this week’s podcast as Nucleus Wealth’s Chief Investment Officer, Damien Klassen, have a look at a range of different predictions for 2025 and assess their likelihood and effect. Can’t make it to the live series? Catch up on the content via Podcasts or our recorded Videos. Damien Klassen is Chief Investment Officer at the Macrobusiness Fund,

The post MB Fund Podcast: 2025 Predictions appeared first on MacroBusiness.

With less than two weeks remaining before his inauguration, President-elect Donald Trump reiterated his warning that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if the captives held by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip are not returned before Trump is sworn in. He added that failure to do so “will not be good for Hamas, and it will not be good, frankly, for anyone.”

My basic thesis for a major AI bubble has so far played out well. But, at this stage, we appear either at the peak of such or poised to correct within the trend.  The Market Ear has more. Massive MOVE Bond volatility, MOVE, is up substantially since mid December. Note we closed above the “psychological”

The post Stock bears growl appeared first on MacroBusiness.