Blogotariat

The ferrous complex is still struggling. Forgive some of the delayed pricing on the chart. SGX is sitting around $96. The latest CISA output data looks more like 2022 than 2024. Though I have to caution that this series has broken down versus official output somewhat this year. The challenges remain. Goldman. The Chinese government’s

The post Iron ore enters the danger zone appeared first on MacroBusiness.

The first term of the Albanese government saw net overseas migration to Australia surge to a record high. It also saw temporary visa numbers balloon nearly 500,000 higher than the pre-pandemic peak: Total international student enrolments also hit a record high of nearly 1.1 million at the end of 2024, nearly 250,000 higher than the

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From Goldman: From a macro perspective, we leave our forecasts for Australia unchanged given the outcome was not a surprise and the ALP’spost-Budget policy announcements have been fairly modest (0.0-0.1% of GDP). We note most of the policies announced in the Budget on 25 March, including income tax cuts for households, have already been legislated.

The post Labor win immaterial for rate cuts appeared first on MacroBusiness.

NAB chief economist Sally Auld has predicted heavy interest rate cuts this year, beginning with a 0.50% cut at the 20 May meeting. “We expect the RBA to cut by 50bps in May, followed by 25bps in July, August, November and February”, Auld wrote in her May update. “With the current setting of monetary policy

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Eighty-nine. That’s the magic number. It will take at least 89 cardinals to elect Pope Francis’ successor. [The author has returned to UCA News after a year away].

That’s the two-thirds supermajority of the 133 men who will enter the Sistine Chapel on 7 May for the largest conclave in history. It would have been even larger had two other cardinal-electors not been too ill to participate.

DXY is struggling mightily to get anywhere. AUD follows EUR. Lead boots plod on. Got to be quick to grab gold these days. Oil in all sorts. Metals no bueno for growth. Big miners perfect down channel. Life for EM? Not if credit has its way. Fed cuts are disappearing. Stocks no likee. AUD is

The post Australian dollar Europe’s new super-currency appeared first on MacroBusiness.

The federal election result carries some hard-won lessons. The overarching lesson for the Liberals is to accept that they’re just not very good at politics.

A fundamental failure: They’ve been suffering a shrinking share of women’s votes since 1996. But the evidence shows they prefer to keep the boys’ club intact even if it pushes them into extinction.

BY Peter Hartcher (SMH)

Labor is entering its second term with climate and energy policies we can track with great accuracy and high frequency - here are some numbers to keep an eye on.

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

The post The root cause of Australia’s productivity collapse appeared first on MacroBusiness.

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.”

The speakers discuss the ongoing Ukraine war, criticizing U.S. involvement and framing it as a geopolitical trap for former President Trump, who they argue should have immediately withdrawn all support to Ukraine upon taking office. They believe that doing so would have ended the war early, with Russia still achieving most of its goals. They argue that Russia was always willing to negotiate for a neutral, demilitarized, and "denazified" Ukraine, but the West ignored this.

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.