There was the Henry Tax Review, left gathering dust on the shelf. Now, there is the heavily prescribed Productivity Roundtable, which will do likewise. A cowardly Albo has ruled everything out. The Australian. Anthony Albanese has laid down his conditions for economic reform in an era of growing polarisation, declaring any policy changes need to
Australia is slowly transforming into 1984’s Ministry of Truth. First, we saw the Albanese government backflip and announce that Australians under 16 would be banned from accessing YouTube. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese also wants to make Australia’s draconian media ban global. Albanese announced that he will promote Australia’s world-first social media age ban and encourage
Australian consumers have been trapped in a recession. The March quarter national accounts showed that real per capita household consumption has been negative for seven consecutive quarters on an annual basis, down 2.4% from its peak. As illustrated below by CBA, the Australian consumer is the largest component of the economy. And the sluggish pace
Are we getting somewhere? The Australian. The top Abu Dhabi executive spearheading its $30bn Santos takeover has opened crunch talks with the Australian Workers Union which took aim at Santos’s venture in Gladstone for sucking up third party gas to meet its LNG export contracts. Mohamed Al Aryani, president of international gas at ADNOC’s XRG,
DXY is down, down. AUD is up, but it’s still a grind. Lead boots to the moon! Commods too. Big bear intact. EM launch! Junk vertical! Yields pounded! Stocks roar! So many exclamation marks in one post means it can only be dovish Fed. Jay Powell at the bottom of the Jackson Hole. Putting the
Risk markets loved Fed Chair Powell’s long awaited speech at the central back fest at Jackson Hole with a dovish tilt seemingly suggesting that the Federal Reserve will cut rates in September, but only if inflation remains contained from the Trump regime’s tariffs. The hint gave Wall Street the signal to buy after five straight
Since U.S. President Donald Trump kicked off the current round of trade tensions with China back in April with the ‘Liberation Day’ announcement of widespread tariffs on Chinese-made goods, Beijing has responded by aggressively limiting the exports of vital rare earth minerals not only to the United States but also to the rest of the
Independent economist Chris Richardson published the following chart on Twitter (X) showing that Australia has experienced one of the poorest increases in living standards over the past decade among advanced OECD nations. “The good news is that Australia’s average has improved since my last update”, Richardson wrote. “The bad news is we still have a
By Lucinda Jerogin, Associate Economist at CBA It was a relatively quiet week locally. Consumer sentiment lifted to a 3½ year high, providing further evidence the household consumption recovery is gaining momentum. The Economic Reform Roundtable was held in Canberra from Tuesday to Thursday. Offshore, geopolitical events dominated headlines. Russia-Ukraine ceasefire talks tookcentre stage, but no
The latest Westpac consumer sentiment survey showed that Australians have become bullish on house prices. House price expectations hit a cyclical high, whereas the ‘time to buy a dwelling’ sub-index also shot higher. The improving sentiment has also been reflected in the auction market, where the national clearance rate has climbed to its highest level