Understanding how the cycle is progressing has been especially difficult in the post-GFC years. The apparent impotence of monetary policy via its traditional credit (and inflation) creation channel contrasts with the relative strength of labour employment. Yet monetary policy has become much more important for markets, as central banks have... Show More
The year is 1991. I’m trading Australian interest rates on the proprietary desk for Bankers Trust. The desk is headed by Richard Farleigh. And the quarterly CPI number is about to be released. In those days, there was 3 opportunities to “trade” a CPI number. First our economist, Andre Morony,... Show More
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has released its latest Construction Work Done figures for the December quarter. Not surprising, residential housing activity looks to have peaked and should soon begin to decline. Broadly speaking, it’s fair to say that the story we have been telling on house prices hitting the... Show More
The Australian dollar has emerged a little stronger after a very busy week. Most of the headlines were positive, with the one real negative coming from the RBA. While there was no surprise in the steady hand on the cash rate at 1.5% or in much of the language of... Show More
Someone (maybe it was Albert Einstein) once opined that: “Insanity Is Doing the Same Thing Over and Over Again and Expecting Different Results” Show More
Today I argue that the smartest thing RBA governor Phil Lowe could do is get the banks to cut rates for him---preserving his monetary policy ammunition for a real crisis---and show that substantial reductions in bank funding costs might enable our largest lenders to do precisely that. I also reveal... Show More
On Tuesday the ABS released December quarter property price data revealing that established house prices across the nation's capitals fell by 5.5% throughout 2018, faster than any twelve month period - including during the GFC. Our wire in December (‘How far is housing from fair value?’) analysed a few different valuation... Show More
In the latest Compexity Premia podcast we cover recent Livewire articles and: debate whether the RBA is going to blow the housing bubble back up with interest rate cuts; discuss new RBA research that blames the central bank for the rapid house price growth between 2012-2017 (contrary to what the... Show More
This week the RBA quietly admitted that low interest rates have played a big part in the rise in Australian house prices. This comes after years of denying the obvious. I say quietly admitted as it came in a “research discussion paper” on its website written by two of its... Show More
Let's take a step back from the monthly housing data and ask ourselves: What's happening in the market and are we seeing a bottom in prices - or are there further falls to come? Show More
In my column today I write "if only the RBA had its brilliant new research on the impact of interest rates on house prices back in 2013 when I warned them that their easy money policy would blow a huge housing bubble, as it subsequently did" (click on that link... Show More
The negative effects of ALP policies on housing, SMSFs and profit margins are already impacting certain sectors of the market, such as banks, residential property developers, homebuilders and retailers. Show More
How good are you at reading people? How about a large frightened animal? It’s an interesting question, in today’s tech driven social world, to consider the skill of “reading” the situation. Is it being lost? Does it matter? Hold that thought, and consider the following. You are asked to step... Show More
RBA Governor, Phillip Lowe, opened his speech at the AFR Business Summit this morning by saying “Australians watch housing markets intensely, perhaps more so than citizens of any other country.” Never has a truer statement been made. Whether you’re a stock market investor, a housing investor, or nothing of the... Show More
A good chart distils terabytes of data into a small image that delivers a big message. And to cherry-pick the messages investors need to hear most right now, we asked some of Australia’s top managers to nominate one chart above all others. Mik Case from Schroders and Chris Rands at... Show More
January 1996. My wife was 8 months pregnant with our first child. I was a proprietary trader at Bankers Trust (had been since 1991), meaning I took macro views on interest rates and currencies. Indeed, very similar to what I do now, but with the bank’s capital rather than investors’... Show More
In December last year, I wrote an article entitled “Nothing Terribly Wrong” talking about the market fears being overdone. At the time the ASX 200 was down 12% from the top. In hindsight, a marvellous thing, I wrote it ten days before the market bottomed. The markets have bounced. Let... Show More
2017 was a great year for well diversified investors – returns were solid (balanced super funds returned around 10%) and volatility was low. So optimism was high going into 2018 but it turned out to be anything but great for investors who saw poor returns (average balanced super funds look... Show More
In my column today I write that RBA governor Phil Lowe needs to pull his head in. It's fine for him to tell the banks to loosen their lending standards, but he isn't the one being sued by ASIC on the basis of an entirely fallacious interpretation of Labor's 2009... Show More
Following the latest move by the US Federal Reserve (Fed) to lift the Fed funds rate to between 2% and 2.25%, the spread between the US and Australian cash rates has inverted to levels not seen since the currency was floated back in December 1983. Show More
