Blogotariat

While the world sweated through consecutive "warmest years on record" in 2023 and 2024, a surge of fossil fuel cash continued to pour into the accounts of Australia's major political

Westpac joins the doves. December quarter CPI surprises to the downside In our CPI Preview, we noted that the risk to our December quarter CPI and Trimmed Mean estimates were to the downside. That risk ended up materialising, with the CPI increasing just 0.2%qtr/2.4%yr (Westpac f/c: 0.3%qtr/2.5%yr) while the Trimmed Mean rose 0.5%qtr/3.2%yr (Westpac f/c:

The post RBA overshoots target appeared first on MacroBusiness.

Another Monday Message Board. Post comments on any topic. Civil discussion and no coarse language please. Side discussions and idees fixes to the sandpits, please.

I’m now using Substack as a blogging platform, and for my monthly email newsletter. For the moment, I’ll post both at this blog and on Substack. You can also follow me on Mastodon here.

China is out of deflation! This is voucherflation as Beijing did giveaways in travel and white goods. Food helped. The PPI is wall-to-wall weakness. Inflation numbers were also boosted by the earlier LNY and will be given back in February. Deflation in China is forever now.

The post Chinese deflation fixed! Not appeared first on MacroBusiness.

Justin Fabo from Antipodean Macro posted the following update on labour productivity across major advanced nations. As you can see, Australia has recorded zero labour productivity growth since 2016, the worst performance of the nations sampled. While the precise causes of the Australian economy’s productivity decline are debatable, I attribute four primary drivers. First, the

There is a marked immaturity in the reporting of opinion polls and other political developments in Australia at the moment. I see problems in two main categories.

First is the seemingly endless pursuit of uniquely Australian explanations for what are obviously global trends.

I hate Victoria. It’s dull, has terrible weather, it’s up itself, and utterly fake left. The one thing it is not is an energy bludger. The East Coast gas cartel and its mates in the press have spent years blaming VIC for gas shortages, and it’s total bullshit. VIC has been the gas powerhouse of

The post Time to roll tanks over the gas cartel appeared first on MacroBusiness.

Goldman is still bullish DXY but not so bearish AUD.  USD: Tariff-fried.We see three key takeaways from a frenzied week. First, the recent back and forth headlines have not altered our view that tariffs are coming and this will materially impact exchange rates. In fact, our economists now expect a larger increase in the effective

The post Major bank: Australian dollar bottomed appeared first on MacroBusiness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=paNpI6zfnpM

Richard Wolff: The FALL of the US Empire–US Denial, Europe Burns, BRICS & China Rise

Australia’s manufacturing sector has shrunk to just over 5% of GDP, the lowest share in the OECD. Late last month, federal Minister for Industry and Science Ed Husic spruiked Labor’s Future Made In Australia policy to boost local manufacturing. “In Labor’s first term in office, the policies have come thick and fast: the $15 billion

The post Australia has no manufacturing future appeared first on MacroBusiness.

My latest from The Guardian

=With the resumption of parliament this week, and an election only months away, we have seen even more of the usual point-scoring about the cost of living, tax breaks for long lunches and budget deficits. But since the return of Donald Trump to the White House, the assumptions on which Australian economic policy have always been based are obsolete.

...These ideologies – and they include catastrophic climate change, diversity politics, #MeToo feminism and transgender rights, as well as critical race theory – are, in fact, deeply conservative, especially in their economic and political effects.

Graham Hryce — Australian journalist and former media lawyer…

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) is riddled with almost unprecedented levels of corruption, and should be shut down, President Donald Trump has said.

In one of the first executive orders after his inauguration, Trump suspended all US foreign aid, pending a three-month review, amid a wider push to cut government spending.