Over the past decade, the Australian economy has recorded some of the poorest productivity growth in the world and the nation’s poorest productivity growth on record. Last week, I presented five reasons why Australia’s productivity growth has declined, namely: The mining boom of the 2000s and the associated surge in the Australian dollar contributed to
Arkansas GOP Senator Tom Cotton is just ITCHING for a war with Iran. In a recent congressional hearing Cotton pointedly asked President Donald Trump's nominee for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine if he is prepared to propose bombing Iran as an option to the President. Cotton also mocked antiwar voices who suggest that our foreign policy is leading us into yet another “endless war.”
After the Liberal Party’s crushing defeat in the weekend’s federal election, it wasn’t going to be long before the recriminations started. However, it is probably useful to go back to the election result to see how extraordinary it was. It is the first time since World War 2 that a first term Australian federal government has had a swing towards it rather than away from it. The swing against such first term governments at their next election has varied from 0.3% to 4.6%, and averages about 1%.
AUD/USD EUR/USD USD/JPY GBP/USD Gold WTI Brent Australia 200 US S&P 500 UK 100 Japan 225
The post Macro Afternoon: 5 May 2025 appeared first on MacroBusiness.
A remarkable before-and-after experiment provides conclusive evidence: the BBC favours the right and excludes the left.
By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 1st May 2025
As trade tensions flared between the world’s largest economies, communication between the United States and China has been so shaky that the two superpowers cannot even agree on whether they are talking at all.
By Stephen Saunders The sanctimonious left-elite is euphoric, confident that Labor is set to inflict six more years of population replacement, energy malfeasance, and housing distress. When Labor unaccountably lost Election 2019, inhouse reviewers Craig Emerson and Jay Weatherill summarised the problems in 500 words. The key message: “Labor should position itself as a party
The Q4 2024 national accounts reported that Australian real per capita household consumption had fallen for eight consecutive quarters: This decline in consumption was in response to an 8% decline in real per capita household disposable incomes: It was also in response to the recent surge in mortgage and rental payments: Westpac has released survey
The ferrous complex struggles on. Flat steel demand is solid. Long not so good . Production is OK. But the trade war is yet to fully strike, including direct tariffs upon steel, and the steel production cuts that come with both, Not out of the woods here yet.
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Over the past decade, the Liberal government in Canada has run the nation’s biggest immigration program in history, which culminated in a record 1.2 million net migrants arriving in the 2023-24 financial year. This surge in population created a record shortfall of housing, as illustrated below: As a result, rental vacancy rates collapsed to record
The Department of Home Affairs has released temporary visa data for Q1 2025, showing a record 2,541,651 temporary visas on issue in Australia (excluding visitors). This figure was around 120,000 higher than the year prior and about 580,000 higher than Q1 2020, before the pandemic. As illustrated below, the surge in temporary visas since Q1
If Albo’s idiots have any brains at all, they will immediately spend their Trump windfall of political capital on embracing Peter Dutton’s gas reservation policies. Returning Australian gas to eastern states’ use is essential to stabilising inflation, the energy transition, and industrial growth, all KPIs for the renewed government. In the meantime, there is potentially