Blogotariat

Kaja Kallas, the European Union’s de facto foreign minister (and former prime minister of Estonia), is unusually, grotesquely incompetent, even for an unelected EU apparatchik.

This week, Israel killed my cousin Mohammed, a young and cheerful lawyer, along with his wife Myriam and their only seven-day-old baby, Jaber.

Australia’s transition to renewable energy will be extremely expensive, raising power bills. The reasons are simple. Renewable energy sources are weather-dependent, resulting in intermittent power and low capacity factors. As a result, renewables require backup hydrocarbon generation and lots of expensive storage. They also require far greater network infrastructure to connect the distributed web of

France faces a day of disruption Wednesday as the "Block Everything" protests, called by a loose left-wing coalition, threaten to obstruct transport and other services. The protests come as Sébastien Lecornu is set to take the reins as France’s new prime minister amid a gridlocked National Assembly. Follow our live coverage of the day's events as they unfold.

SunCable now focusing on near term opportunities with data centres, which it hopes to power from the late 2020s.

A new tool to help build renewables in the right places will launch this November. BirdLife Australia’s Golo Maurer explains how it works and why it could be a game-changer.

The Reserve Bank of New Zealand has slashed the official cash rate by 2.5% since July 2024. As illustrated below by Justin Fabo from Antipodean Macro, the decline in New Zealand’s official cash rate has sent mortgage rates sharply lower: Historically, falling interest rates have been associated with rising home prices, as increased mortgage serviceability

The post The Great New Zealand house price crash appeared first on MacroBusiness.

Victoria’s finances are dire. The state has the nation’s lowest credit rating and the highest per capita debt. The major rating agencies have warned that unless Victoria gets its debt under control, it will face more ratings downgrades. Interest repayments on the state’s debt, already forecast to reach $10.6 billion annually by FY 2029, would

The post Victorian government drowns taxpayers in more bureaucracy appeared first on MacroBusiness.

Ferrous madness continues as steel margins collapse. Scuttlbutt is nonsense. Miner Rio Tinto could be forced to build refiners for the Simandou ore in Guinea, Australia’s Financial Review reported on Sunday. The Simandou iron ore project, with an annual production capacity of 120 million metric tons, is expected first ore shipment in November, and put

The post Yawn. No, Chinese property is not recovering appeared first on MacroBusiness.

Australian dwelling values hit a new record high in August. The national final auction clearance rate also averaged 69% in August, the strongest result since February 2024. The bounce in dwelling values and auction clearance rates follows three 25 bp rate cuts delivered by the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) since February, taking the official

The post Aussies hyper bullish on house prices appeared first on MacroBusiness.

The solution to Australia’s rental crisis is being played out in real time in Canada. Rents in Canada soared to a record high in response to the country’s largest immigration influx in history. Last year, the Canadian government imposed a three-year pause on population growth to relieve the strains on housing and infrastructure. In the

The post Canada cut immigration and rents fell appeared first on MacroBusiness.

The NAB survey yesterday confirmed an economic pop. The top business conditions indicator returned to +7, the same level as in June, after reversing the two-point drop that occurred in July. At this point, the index is in line with its long-term average, indicating that companies believe the current state of affairs to be generally

The post Pent-up demand gives economy a pop appeared first on MacroBusiness.