Australia

Daily comments on finance, economic and market news for 6 Jun 2013

Australia's central bank left rates on hold yesterday as was generally expected. The RBA continues to be quite hawkish as well as relatively optimistic on the nation's economy. Given the "cash rate" is at historical lows at 2.75%, the board…

Australia just cut its policy rate to 2.75%, the lowest on record. That puts Australia into the same camp as all of the other major economic areas, where policy rates are all at record low levels. If you believe that Australia has used…

The yen bears have been frustrated by a series of developments. They were unpleasantly surprised by news that the Japanese themselves were large sellers, not buyers, of foreign bonds in the first full week of the new fiscal year. In…

Here are 10 items that investors will be watching this week.

In the past year, I have increasingly turned away from the US housing market to stress the difficulties now besetting other global housing markets because there have been large house price appreciations (and some declines) elsewhere in…

Last year, I started my weekly newsletter out with Ten Surprises for 2012. The goal was to give you a list of things that investors only assigned one in three odds of occuring that I believed had a fifty percent or better chance of…

Australian property market is seeing transaction volume fall. Preliminary Melbourne sales data for 2012 from the Real Estate Institute of Victoria says that 69,000 home sales were registered last year. While that is a fall of only 3,000…

I have a panoply of links today. There is no one over-riding theme though I do want to address the Japan question in more depth at some point. I have seen some commentary from Kyle Bass and Jeffrey Gundlach on the dire straits Japan finds…

By Marc Chandler The Wall Street Journal brings to our attention the fact that the reserves at the Reserve Bank of Australia have risen sharply over the past two months. Its reserves have risen by A$863 mln over the past two months after…