The 60 day ceasefire enabling negotiation of a final deal on the Straits of Hormuz ends tomorrow week.

Cotality’s daily dwelling values index continues to fall across all major Australian capital cities. Over the past month, values have fallen by 1% at the 5-city aggregate level, with Sydney (-1.5%) and Melbourne (-1.2%) leading the decline and smaller falls recorded across the other major capitals.

Every time another tech giant announces billions of dollars in spending on AI infrastructure, the same question comes to mind: are we witnessing the next great technological revolution, or simply watching another investment bubble inflate?

The ethical investing boom has hit a structural wall. For years, super funds and fund managers have funnelled billions into “Sustainable,” “ESG,” or “Ethical” Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs).

By Stephen Saunders Since 2006, Big Australia has sailed on through seven prime ministers.

New data compiled by The Guardian Australia from Housing Australia shows that 50,633 guarantees were issued in the first nine months after the Albanese government expanded the 5% deposit scheme on 1 October 2025.

Alex Joiner, chief economist at IFM Investors, posted the following chart on X (Twitter) illustrating the massive difference in goods (merchandise) exports between NSW and Victoria.

LVO is back at the coalface with a blunt pick today.

The ferrous complex remains under pressure amid mounting cross-currents.

Former senior Australian Treasury official David Pearl gave a fantastic interview on the John Anderson podcast where, among other things, he highlighted how economic policy in Australia has lost focus on growing the economy via productivity improvements and has become increasingly reliant on government spending and interference to drive growth.

TME kicks us off.

When you exploit and ruin a country for seventy years, should you really be surprised that when it wins the war against you, it is payback time?

Over the past week, the Australian media has been full of articles about the sharp decline in home values, with one commentator noting that Labor’s budget has triggered a housing slump that has wiped $230 billion from property values.

The National Housing Accord’s target of building 1.2 million homes over five years, or 240,000 annually, is falling way behind, with only 307,635 dwellings completed over the first 21 months of the Accord, 112,365 (27%) fewer than the run rate required to meet the target.

Sometimes it takes a personal angle to attract interest. I have been discussing the developing super El Niño for a couple of months without anyone taking much notice. The SOI (within its usual statistical parameters) is predicting a global food disaster.

When Tanya Plibersek was Australia’s housing minister under the Rudd government, Labor relaxed FIRB rules for foreign buyers, including: Allowing temporary residents to buy established dwellings without prior FIRB approval Raising monetary thresholds for screening Plibersek argued at the time that these changes were justified to support housing demand during the GFC.

I knew it was bad, but not this bad. China is eating the German economy alive. Check out this chart from UBS. It will be even worse for German exports across the world (though it retains a large trade surplus) as Chinese exports displace German goods in all markets.

Most of Australia’s previous privatisations were anti-competitive and led to private monopolies that harmed consumers and taxpayers. Our politicians embraced this agenda because it permitted them to achieve both lower taxes and lower public debt (in the short term) by simply shifting monopoly ownership from public to private hands.

Ferrous remains the outlier in the exaggerated dead cat bounce, popping a little without steel support, probably thanks to the Pilbara strike in two days.

When former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull first announced Snowy Hydro 2.0 pumped hydro project in 2017, it was billed as a $2 billion project capable of producing 2 megawatts of power on demand and 350,000 megawatt-hours of storage by 2021.