Jeff Kennett today predicts a Victorian election boil over: Four years ago the ALP was fraudulently using public moneys for its own electoral purposes — the Red Shirts Affair — and then spent voters’ money trying to stop it becoming public. Recently we saw Premier Daniel Andrews refuse to allow the 21 MPs, including six
By Leith van Onselen Today’s Lending Finance data for September, released by the ABS, revealed that personal and renovation finance continue to collapse. Personal finance commitments were down 5.4% over the year, are down 24% since the March 2013 peak, and are tracking at the lowest level since December 2002: In a similar vein, renovation
By Leith van Onselen Yesterday, we attacked the Morrison Government’s plan to halve funding to charity Foodbank, which provides meals to 710,000 needy Australians. Thankfully we can today report that the community backlash has forced the Coalition to backflip: The National Farmers’ Federation, the community sector and Labor yesterday slammed the Government’s plans to slash
By Leith van Onselen The Morrison Government’s ‘migrants to the bush’ smokescreen has been comprehensively exposed with regional migration approvals hitting a decade low. From The ABC: Regional visa approvals have fallen to their lowest levels in a decade as the Federal Government prepares to introduce a scheme requiring new arrivals to work outside the
Hmmm…at the AFR: Former Macquarie banker Andrew Hooper-Nguyen and his business partner, the co-founder of ASX-listed Excel Coal, Chris Ellis, have made a bulk purchase of brand new apartments at Rich Lister Tim Gurner’s FV tower in Brisbane where there have already been discounts of 24 percent from sales made four years ago. …”Market weakness
AUD is under pressure still: Bonds are bid: As XJO gets flushed: Big Iron is hit: Big Gas too: Big Gold is fading away: Big Bank’s dead cat is on the way down again: Big Property is ugly. Great to see Domain leading the way down: Duck.
From DFA’s latest household survey of 52,000 Australian households: The results from the DFA household surveys to the end of October 2018 are out today. The index measures households overall comfort level with their finances across a number of key dimensions. Recent home price trends, lower returns on deposits and share market gyrations have combined
By Leith van Onselen Australia’s speculator frenzy continues to unwind abruptly, according to today’s Lending Finance data for September, released by the ABS. As shown below, the annual value of investor loans in New South Wales (read Sydney) is falling fast, as is Victoria (read Melbourne). Investor loans in the other major jurisdictions are also in
The NAB business survey is out and the boom is over bar the shouting: Business conditions have eased back from the high levels seen earlier in the year but remain well above average. Forward orders (the most reliable indicator of domestic demand) remain a touch above average but significantly below levels reported in H1 2018.
So says Chanticleer: Joye’s message was not to panic. Even if the market were to really tank there were plenty of options for regulators and governments wishing to stabilise the situation. It is my view that when the RBA is forced to cut next year it will stabilise the market for a while (assuming it
By Leith van Onselen It was expected that the proposed ‘free trade agreement’ (FTA) between Australia and Indonesia would be signed on the sidelines of the East Asia Summit this week. However, Indonesia has reportedly told Australia that it will not sign the FTA until Australia rules out any prospect of moving its embassy in
By Leith van Onselen The Coalition’s repeated assertion that Australia’s smaller states and regions are “begging for migrants” has received a lukewarm reception. After Prime Minister Scott Morrison yesterday announced that he would give the states a say on how many migrants they want, Western Australia’s Premier, Mark McGowan, pushed back: “If the federal government want
Via the ABC: In an extraordinary move, the Federal Court has refused to approve a $35 million penalty for Westpac, despite the bank admitting it broke responsible lending laws.The penalty was a negotiated settlement between Westpac and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission (ASIC).However, in a highly critical judgment, Justice Nye Perram said “admirable ingenuity
By Leith van Onselen Just when I thought we’d hit peak stupid in the negative gearing debate, along comes The Courier Mail’s Peter Gleeson with the following faeces laden argument that Labor’s policy will somehow hit battlers the most: OF ALL the destructive policies to be implemented under a Bill Shorten-led People’s Socialist Republic of
By Leith van Onselen Acadata has released its latest house price results for the UK, which shows that house price growth has fallen to its lowest level in 6.5 years: House prices rebounded in October, up 0.4% – the first increase since February. The annual rate of price increases continued to slow, however, dropping to
So says CoreLogic’s Tim Lawless in a well considered argument at the AFR: Tim Lawless of housing data firm Corelogic said that for “the first time in forever” there was a potential split among top regulators that make up the Council of Financial Regulators in how to deal with a declining property market. While the
By Leith van Onselen CoreLogic is dialling up the warnings about Australia’s budding housing bust. After Friday’s disastrous housing finance figures, which showed both owner-occupied finance crashing, Cameron Kusher predicted both housing growth and sales will take another leg down: Given the ongoing declines in dwelling values, particularly in Sydney and Melbourne, and the now apparent
Is the Pope a Catholic? First, via The Australian: Bill Shorten has defended Premier Daniel Andrews for joining China’s Belt and Road Initiative, arguing the deal was part of the “normal day to day work” of state politicians. The Opposition Leader said he was not surprised Mr Andrews released the memorandum of understanding over the
Via The Australian: An exclusive Newspoll conducted for The Australian revealed a seven-point fall in support for Mr Shorten’s centrepiece housing policy amid a softening market, although backers of Labor’s tax overhaul still outweigh opponents by 47 to 33 per cent. Of those surveyed, 42 per cent believed the policy would cause house prices to
Via the AFR: Melbourne housing lot prices will “quickly” tumble up to 10 per cent as Uber-driving speculators and foreign investors default on thousands of sales contracts, Financial Review Rich Lister Nigel Satterley has warned. …”We believe that over the next 30 months 5000 growth-area lots (about 165 lots a month) will return to the
Yet to put the words “macro” and “prudential” into a single sentence, Professor Warwick McKibbin is still demanding higher interest rates, at the AFR: “My view is that interest rates should have been raised at least a year ago to 2 per cent to 2.25 per cent,” Professor McKibbin, a globally recognised macroeconomist based at
King Dollar is back. CNY was weak. EUR cracked a big head and shoulders pattern: AUD was thumped versus USD and JPY, rose against EUR and GBP: It was a mix versus EMs: Gold was hammered: Oil waltzed straight through OPEC cuts: Base metals were mixed but copper fell: Big Miners were hit: EM stocks
By Chris Becker A poor start to the trading week for overnight markets with US stocks selling off sharply on the back of tech giant Apple and confounded by falling oil prices that are hurting energy stocks. Brexit negotiations are also fouling up the roost in Europe while the USD is soaring against the major
Iron ore prices for November 12, 2018: Spot eased. Paper rallied. Steel is breaking. Ferrous complex looks ripe for shunt lower here.
By Leith van Onselen It’s been amazing watching Scott Morrison’s speedy transformation from mass immigration ‘Big Australia’ defender to a sceptic on the verge of slashing the permanent migrant intake. As recently as four months ago, Scott Morrison lambasted Tony Abbott’s push to cut the migrant intake to 110,000, warning it risked Australia’s future economic
By Leith van Onselen I know Stephen Koukoulas is a Labor guy and is a good team player, but he’s drawing a long bow suggesting that Labor’s negative gearing and capital gains tac (CGT) might actually “put a floor on house prices”: The government is claiming that the negative gearing change will “take a sledgehammer”,
CoreLogic’s weekly housing indicators are fugly today. Mortgage credit is fading when it should be surging: Listings are ripping towards 2012 highs: And auction failure is now near universal having spread from suburbs to inner city and out to neighbouring centres: The bust is still clearly building momentum. Full report.
Via Westpac: Chinese steel, iron ore and coal Chinese environmental policies have boosted the demand for higher grades of iron ore but in the long run they may drive a structural shift in demand. Chinese mills are increasingly using scrap steel as its supply grows with more buildings being torn down, more cars crushed and
The Council of Foreign Relations has some bad news for Australia: Over the past two years, as our left-hand figure above shows, foreign portfolio investors have piled prodigiously into Chinese assets, helping to support the RMB. But history suggests this trend is about to reverse. While inflows have been rising, Chinese stocks have been tumbling—they are
Global Macro / Markets / Investing: The CEO obsession with bitcoin and blockchain is over – Axios Clever Map Shows the True Size of Countries – Visual Capitalist Be Afraid of Economic ‘Bigness.’ Be Very Afraid – NY Times Why “Qualified Opportunity Zones” May Be the Next Hot Thing in Investing – Barron’s Elon Musk
