Blogotariat

DXY faded Friday night. AUD bounced. CNY too. Oil and gold sideways. AI metals stalled. Big miners trying. EM ouch. Junk OK. Yield eased.   Stocks dump and pump. It’s all about the government shutdown now. Scott Bessent, US Treasury Secretary, is on the hustings saying growth might halve in Q4 and prices fall away.

The post Australian dollar lifts as tariff gifts rain 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.

No jobs report for you! So that’s two months of non-existent unemployment data from the US due to the Republicans shutting down their own government so markets are unable to navigate or pivot on the non-farm payroll data and instead wonder at what is going on “under the hood” of the world’s largest economy (for

The post Macro Morning appeared first on MacroBusiness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rb3TMw5FGUQ

Nexperia Crisis Ends in Humiliation for The Hague - China Wins, Netherlands Folds

Russia has no intention of violating its obligations under international agreements banning nuclear tests, but will resume testing if other countries do, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has said.

Like most of my colleagues in art history, English, history, modern languages, musicology, philosophy, rhetoric and adjacent fields, I am concerned about the current crisis in the humanities. Then again, as a student of the history of the modern university, I know that there haven’t been too many decades over the last 150 years during which we humanities scholars have not employed the term “crisis” to portray our place in the academy. 

The housing market appears to have lost some momentum due to the recent inflation shock and expectations that the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) will keep interest rates on hold for the foreseeable future. Cotality’s daily dwelling values index continues to show the strongest growth in over two years, measured on a rolling 28-day basis:

The post Reality check sucks FOMO out of housing market appeared first on MacroBusiness.

I have been reading the book ‘The Great Wave’1 by Michiko Kakutani which was given to me by a mate who thought I would enjoy it. Kakutani is an American Pulitzer Prize winning literary critic and writer2. The book is subtitled ‘The era of radical disruption and the rise of the outsider’1.

While the first 60 or so pages have been interesting, there have been a few sections on that road which piqued my interest. One of these was a paragraph (on p. 45) quoting Jaron Lanier3, who was a “pioneer in the development of virtual reality and a member of Silicon Valley’s founding generation”1.

By Harry Ottley, economist at CBA: The RBA left the cash rate on hold at 3.60% as widely expected.The post-meeting communication was not quite as hawkish as we had expected. The data flow was mixed with home price rises accelerating and building approvals improving but household spending looking a touch softer than expected. Offshore, soft

The post The economic week ahead appeared first on MacroBusiness.

The US government shutdown is inflicting “far worse” economic damage than had been estimated and could cut fourth quarter GDP growth in half, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett has warned.

The 38-day shutdown, the longest in US history, is hitting travel, hotel and construction sectors particularly hard, he told Fox Business in an interview on Friday.

On 7 March, Syrian security forces and affiliated armed factions perpetrated the massacre of more than 1,500 Alawite civilians, including many elderly, women, and children, in 58 separate locations on the Syrian coast.

The ferrous complex is buckling. Steel output cuts are so far insufficient to lift steel prices. Iron must fall much further if steel mill margins are to be restored. Weekly data from consultancy firm Mysteel showed that fewer than 40% of the 247 surveyed steel mills were profitable, a level last seen in October 2024.

The post Iron ore enters the perfect storm appeared first on MacroBusiness.

It’s that time of the great proxy war crusade against Russia again. Someone in the mainstream West has woken up to, if not the facts about the politics of Ukraine, then at least a quantum of disquiet.