The burning of the books, along with the rounding up of all intellectuals and historians, are two of the prerequisites for any takeover of a liberal political economy by a tyrant. As any good despot knows, you can’t have the people informed about the context if you want to have them rounded up. Australian writers’
Friday night was a tale of two jobs reports – Canadian and American – with the latter NFP print coming in weak again although the headline unemployment number fell, giving USD a boost eventually after a volatile session. All the action was really in precious metals and commodities as geopolitical risk hots up across Iran
Following the release of the official Q2 2025 population statistics from the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), IFM Investors’ chief economist, Alex Joiner, published the following chart on Twitter (X) illustrating the extremeness of Australia’s recent population growth. Joiner noted that “in Q4 2000, it took 12 years of net migration to that point to
Donald Trump’s anarcho-imperialism has given DXY a new leg as snowflake EUR melts in the new world order. AUD is at critical support. CNY is still supportive. Gold is unstoppable. Oil trying again. Metals did better, but DXY up means they are going down. EM too. Junk rejection. US curve keeps steepening. Stocks liked weak
Dancing, dancing, dancing! There is no stopping the iron-ore-crazy man. Except for one small problem. Steel mill margins are being obliterated. These developments will weaken the start of 2026 steel production, especially because steel product inventories are higher than last year. And there is another problem. The iron-ore-crazy man is dancing on top of the
Robber Fly with catch Photo courtesy of Geoff McVeigh Reads (more coming) Why is Trump interested in Greenland? Look to the thawing Arctic ice – The Guardian Here’s why Labour is struggling to deliver: the British state is immense, but pull the levers and nothing happens – The Guardian The Bondi
Asian share markets are generally higher in the final session of the week however are hedging what will come later tonight with the expected US Supreme Court ruling on the Trump regime’s tariffs and the post-government shutdown employment print – aka the NFP. News that Trump wants to make his own QE by purchasing $200
The Aussie trade balance for November was out yesterday and shows one great, big trend: a disappearing trade surplus. Some of this was always going to happen as the post-Ukraine War commodities mania subsided. I expect we’ll be running a deficit by year’s end as iron ore and energy continue to fall, despite gold. There
Calculated Risk sums the data. On Friday at 8:30 AM ET, the BLS will release the employment report for December. The consensus is for 55,000 jobs added, and for the unemployment rate to decrease to 4.5%. There were 64,000 jobs added in November, and the unemployment rate was at 4.6%. From Goldman Sachs: We forecast that
Charts from TME. SPX is caught in a bearish rising wedge, tough it could also be seen as a bullsh asending triangle. Tech is more neutral and could go either way from a symmetrical triangle. The NY rotation has been from tech to the broader market, or, put another way, from AI spenders to AI