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
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
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.
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
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.