Pete is a Chartered Accountant, Chartered Secretary and has a Financial Planning Diploma. Using a long term approach to building businesses, investing in equities, & owning a portfolio he achieved financial independence at the age of 33. Visit his blog
Are we going to experience a V shaped recovery or a U shaped one? In recent times the Aussie economy has been through a disruptive banking Royal Commission and a credit squeeze, and growth in the economy has accordingly been running at the slowest pace since the financial crisis. The housing market has experienced quite…
Bit of a chartfest today: a look at the tale of woe that is building approvals in six quick charts. Attached dwelling approvals nosedived another 18 per cent in July 2019 to be 44 per cent lower than a year earlier, driven by huge ongoing declines in unit approvals in Sydney, Melbourne, and Brisbane. The…
A bit less so in the news at the moment, but there has been no slowdown in the rate of Australia’s population growth. The population clock will roar to beyond 25½ million within the next six weeks, having first passed 25 million just a year ago. Annual permanent and long-term arrivals hit a record high…
My wife hails from a farming family, and has always been conscious of the need to survive the lean years which agriculture tends to throw up periodically. Growing up on the farm, there were some years where the inclement British weather didn’t allow for a productive harvest, bringing on acute cashflow concerns. But crop shortages…
It’s been a tough time for bank margins locally, with interest rates falling all around the world. But it was good to see lower home arrears reported in Commonwealth Bank’s FY 2019 result. Although there were pockets of stress evident in Western Australia and the Northern Territory, overall delinquencies remained low and ticked down to…
The credit squeeze has stymied the Aussie economy to the brink of a recession – at least in per capita terms – and that’s in spite of booming commodity prices. There was zero business credit growth in May, and the measure turned negative in June. This helped to take annual credit growth sharply down to…
Like many getting-a-bit-long-in-the-tooth Sydneysiders, I’ve increasingly been having recurring daydreams about selling a place at Bondi or in the inner west and trading it for a mansion at Maroochydore (or sometimes it’s a mooring at Mooloolaba). Probably about once a fortnight I have these fantasises, on average, I reckon. And then reality bites. I wake…
Nearly two out of three Aussies are now participating in the labour force according to the latest ABS stats released this week. For 16 to 64 year-olds the ratio is nearly up to four in every five. This is great news, but it’s also making it darned tricky to get the unemployment rate down as…
Net overseas migration into Australia picked up right across the board in 2018, but especially into Queensland and New South Wales. This was driven by fewer overseas departures rather than more arrivals. Annual overseas migration has temporarily been higher than this before, in 2008-9, but nevertheless it was a thumping rate of growth for calendar…
Despite the natural desire to break down the housing market into soundbites and neat changes in median prices, sub-markets remain just as fractured and diverse as they ever were. Population growth tends to be a political hot potato, but while the headlines have quietened lately, the ballooning Australia headcount has slowed barely at all, and…
