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Renew Economy Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 14:03 Source
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MacroBusiness Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 14:00 Source

New Zealand’s economy continues to face severe challenges. As illustrated below by Justin Fabo from Antipodean Macro, the Reserve Bank of New Zealand’s GDP growth nowcast is pointing to a 0.2% decline in real GDP in Q2 2025. New Zealand’s labour market is also in dire straits, with unemployment and underutilisation rates soaring to near-decade

The post Recession alarm sounds for Reserve Bank appeared first on MacroBusiness.

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THE BLOT REPORT Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 13:49 Source

I have been posting stuff on the Blotreport for over eight years now, and I receive an enormous amount of spam, sometimes up to 60 a day, which my wonderful spam filter invariably catches. When I started back in early 2017, a fair proportion of the spam was porn, both gay and straight. That eventually faded away and was replaced, strangely, by several other themes, including a spate of “buy a house in Bali” spam. That was fairly short-lived, and was replaced even more bizarrely by “get a diploma in Moscow, which faded fairly recently, although the occasional one still crops up.

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MacroBusiness Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 13:30 Source

At the end of 2024, CoreLogic (now Cotality) reported that the national dwelling value to income ratio and the percentage of income required to service a new mortgage were tracking at a record high. Cotality’s July housing report showed that the median dwelling value across Australia’s capital cities was $926,854 at the end of July.

The post Australian house prices hit affordability ceiling appeared first on MacroBusiness.

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MacroBusiness Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 13:00 Source

The Market Ear on bearish seasonality. Two-faced market Market sentiment surveys and hedge fund positioning data continue to be far from exuberant, but there is of course still an insane amount of buying going on. Let’s have a look at the latest in terms of flow and positioning data out over the weekend, and why

The post Get your hedges appeared first on MacroBusiness.

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MacroBusiness Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 12:30 Source

RBC with the note. As anticipated, the Anchorage meeting between President Trump and Putin yielded no serious deal specifics but plenty of smiles and positive sound bites signaling diplomatic progress. Ahead of Friday, we noted that the prospects of meaningful sanctions relief stemming from this summit were minimal, due in large part to the fact

The post Ukraine war progress slow appeared first on MacroBusiness.

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MacroBusiness Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 12:00 Source

DXY is refusing to go away. AUD is looking shaky. CNY stable. Gold and oil becalmed. Metals are troubled. Mining bear is back. EM stocks are filling the upside breakout. Junk fine. Yields firming a little. Stocks stuck. Morgan Stanley has a take I agree with. The good news was tariff price pressures were muted

The post Fed hawks to savage Australian dollar appeared first on MacroBusiness.

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MacroBusiness Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 11:30 Source

South Australia is held up as the nation’s renewable energy leader with the highest penetration of wind and solar generation in the nation. South Australia shut down its last coal-fired power plant in 2016 and now generates more than 70% of its electricity from renewable sources, mainly wind and solar. However, the shutting down of

The post South Australia a prelude to nation’s energy future appeared first on MacroBusiness.

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Renew Economy Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 11:18 Source
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MacroBusiness Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 11:16 Source

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.

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Renew Economy Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 11:15 Source
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MacroBusiness Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 11:00 Source

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.

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Your Democracy Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 10:52 Source

Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky hailed Monday’s negotiations with US President Donald Trump as the best meeting they have ever had.

Zelensky met with Trump at the White House, alongside several leaders from Western Europe. The summit came three days after Trump held his first face-to-face meeting since 2019 with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Alaska.

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Renew Economy Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 10:46 Source
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MacroBusiness Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 10:30 Source

The ferrous complex has flamed out as we approach the Beijing warmongering season. Channel checks by Goldman are OK. Orderbook trend- The forward orderbooks of most steel mills were mostly flat MoM in Aug, in line with seasonality. High-frequency weekly data suggests current steel demand down by 2.8% yoy for construction steel and up 5.1%

The post Iron ore fades into Beijing warmongering appeared first on MacroBusiness.

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MacroBusiness Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 10:00 Source

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

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MacroBusiness Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 09:30 Source

Will Idiot Albo and Chicken Chalmers do something? AFR. BlueScope chief executive Mark Vassella has warned that large parts of Australia’s manufacturing sector could be forced to shut because of high gas prices, which also threaten the steelmaker’s plans to revive the loss-making Whyalla plant. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese’s Future Made in Australia strategy to

The post Bluescope punches gas cartel in the face appeared first on MacroBusiness.

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MacroBusiness Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 09:00 Source

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.

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MacroBusiness Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 08:00 Source

Nearly a decade ago, in 2016, then Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) Chairman, Rod Sims, delivered a speech on the growing concentration of Australian industry. New research undertaken by Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) economists has concluded that increased market concentration in some sectors of the economy has weighed on productivity. The RBA economists found

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Renew Economy Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 06:02 Source
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Your Democracy Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 05:55 Source

Following his meeting with Ukraine’s Zelensky, US President Donald Trump declared that there are decent odds of finally ending the Ukrainian conflict.

He added that:

Russian President Vladimir Putin and Ukraine’s Zelensky want to resolve the Ukrainian conflict

European leaders also want peace in the region

Zelensky did not give a clear answer whether he is ready for territorial concessions

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Your Democracy Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 05:22 Source

 

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.

 

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Renew Economy Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 05:00 Source
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Your Democracy Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 04:44 Source

 

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

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MacroBusiness Tuesday, August 19, 2025 - 00:05 Source

Earlier this year, Matt Bell of The Australian wrote an article based on the Hays 2025 Skills Report, saying that Australia was experiencing a skills crisis, with businesses struggling to recruit staff with the necessary abilities. Similar views have been expressed throughout the lead-up to the federal government’s productivity summit, even though Jobs and Skills

The post Australia needs skills, not Uber drivers appeared first on MacroBusiness.

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THE BLOT REPORT Monday, August 18, 2025 - 23:00 Source

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.

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Renew Economy Monday, August 18, 2025 - 22:25 Source
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Cheeseburger Gothic Monday, August 18, 2025 - 16:36 Source

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.

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MacroBusiness Monday, August 18, 2025 - 16:30 Source

Asian share markets are green across the board in a very quiet session as macro news is dominated by Trump getting played by Putin over the weekend while his regime tries to bully India and China with little result. The moves to watch this week will be the Jackson Hole conference on Friday with Fed

The post Macro Afternoon appeared first on MacroBusiness.

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Your Democracy Monday, August 18, 2025 - 16:19 Source

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.

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