Macro Afternoon: 3 December 2025
AUD/USD EUR/USD USD/JPY GBP/USD Gold West Texas Intermediate Brent ASX200 US S&P 500 UK 100 Japan 225
The post Macro Afternoon: 3 December 2025 appeared first on MacroBusiness.
Articles from MacroBusiness
Primary tabs
Green iron and steel in a deep freeze
IEEFA wants Albo to waste another $1bn on green iron. As Australia pours $1 billion into its Green Iron Investment Fund, it can learn important lessons from the US and EU, where several low-emissions steel projects backed by capital grants were subsequently cancelled or delayed. Projects with a “gas first, green hydrogen later” approach struggled,
Chinese Titanic sucked into deflationary depths
China printed a bit of inflation in October, but it was pretty obviously seasonal. There is bugger all momentum in prices. The PPI was worse, though it also fell over the line in the month. Anti-involution has dented deflation but it is temporary. Bloomberg has some great charts on the great deflation. Rise of
Time to cancel the ABC
It is time to shutter the ABC. Flag burning should be criminalised, immigration should be capped based on housing supply, and the ABC and SBS should be sold and replaced by a taxpayer-funded broadcaster only for regional and outback Australia, according to resolutions to be debated at the Liberal National Party’s state council this weekend.
Australia’s bloated bureaucrat economy
Last week, I reported an AFR analysis of 16 financial reports from federal agencies, which revealed that 14 had unbudgeted increases in staff expenses totaling $841 million. Budget watcher Chris Richardson warned that the wage blowout could threaten the federal budget’s March forecast of a $42 billion deficit for this financial year, as could the billions
New York turns hard left, the driving numbers
With the election of Zohran Mamdani to the office of Mayor of New York, an event thought practically impossible just a few decades ago has come to pass: the most populous city in the United States and the centre of the financial world has an avowed socialist as its mayor. His victory speech possessed themes
Panicked Chalmers to restore energy rebates
OMG. The economists are panicking. “Interest rate cuts are off the table,” Mr Bloxham said. “The problem is that productivity is so weak that supply is constrained. So as input costs such as labour and energy rise there is no equal increase in output.” UBS economist George Tharenou said the underlying inflation rate would overshoot
Use pensioners to solve labour shortages
Like other advanced nations, Australia is facing pressures from an ageing population. The federal government has tried to mitigate these ageing pressures by running a high immigration policy to mitigate labour shortages and increase the number of taxpayers. Former senior immigration department bureaucrat Abul Rizvi believes that Australia’s annual net overseas migration will average 300,000
Reality check sucks FOMO out of housing market
The housing market appears to have lost some momentum due to the recent inflation shock and expectations that the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) will keep interest rates on hold for the foreseeable future. Cotality’s daily dwelling values index continues to show the strongest growth in over two years, measured on a rolling 28-day basis:
The economic week ahead
By Harry Ottley, economist at CBA: The RBA left the cash rate on hold at 3.60% as widely expected.The post-meeting communication was not quite as hawkish as we had expected. The data flow was mixed with home price rises accelerating and building approvals improving but household spending looking a touch softer than expected. Offshore, soft