Qingdao port prices firmed a touch to $97.93 Friday. Shanghai rebar futures are a free-falling meteorite The jaws of doom returned to SGX iron ore futures: HRC is not much better: Mad Dalian rolled overnight: Coking coal has no bottom: Steel profitability is smashed: Hot metal output has rolled: There’s ore inventory galore to destock:
Politicians, think tanks, vested interests, and the media frequently spread the myth that high levels of immigration are necessary to raise productivity and living standards in Australia. Yet, the actual lived empirical evidence shows the opposite, with Australian productivity and living standards eroding over the past 20 years of ‘Big Australia’ immigration. Reflecting poor productivity,
Here is the full transcript of the Politburo measures to boost Chinese consumption. It is worth reading to get a full grasp of how lost Beijing is. Opinions of the State Council on Promoting High-Quality Development of Service Consumption The People’s Governments of all provinces, autonomous regions, and municipalities directly under the Central Government, and
The Market Ear kicks us off. Hello old friend Extreme fear is back…Chart shows the CNN indicator vs SPX. MacroMicro SPX and THE trend line SPX is trading well below the huge trend line that has been in place since October 2023. Note we are below the 100 day as of writing. 200 day is
Ignore the hawks, for they are wrong again. Former RBA board member Warwick McKibbin and former RBA senior official Jonathan Kearns are two economists who think the elation – the S&P/ASX 200 hit a record before a Friday plunge on softer US employment data – may have been overdone. McKibbin says financial market participants this
Albo energy disaster rolls on today with gas still sitting comfortably above his $12Gj price floor: While wholesale electricity prices march higher in the highest ever winter prices outside of wartime: Albo has doubled the average wholesale price of electricity in 2.5 years. These prices are higher than Europe, and on a par with the
A turmultous Friday night that was preceded by epic falls in Japanese equities with Wall Street also falling sharply in the wake of the latest official US job report – aka the non farm payrolls – that already had risk markets spooked before the print. Not helping were some poor signalling from Amazon earnings surrounding
On Friday, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) released housing finance data that shattered the notion that investors are quitting Australia’s housing market. In June 2024, investor mortgage commitments totalled $11,016 million, up 30.2% over the same month in 2023. In comparison, there were $18,170 million in owner-occupier mortgages (excluding refinances) in June 2024, up
After pumping endless propaganda about fake international education exports, lobby group Universities Australia continues to desperately argue that the tidal wave of international students arriving in Australia is not negatively impacting Australian renters. Over the weekend, Universities Australia claimed that international students were being “scapegoated” and that vacancy rate data is evidence that the unprecedented
DXY was smashed Friday night: That prevented a rout in the AUD: Specs have moved short AUD again but there is plenty of room to fall: North Asia is wild: Oil is at breaking point: Dirt is in free fall: Miners are deluded: EM is breaking down: Junk spreads finally joined the pessimism: Even as