CBA sold off after $10b result; 4-day week rejected; huge house profits

CBA sold off after $10b result; 4-day week rejected; huge house profits

News in brief

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has rejected calls for a four-day working week ahead of the economic reform roundtable in Canberra next week. The proposal from the Australian Council of Trade Unions calls for shorter working hours without loss of pay, saying that workers deserve to share in productivity gains.

 

Wages grew at a steady pace in the June quarter, increasing by 3.4% over the year. The June quarter Wage Price Index shows public sector pay increases were slightly higher than the private sector.

 

Rental growth across Australia’s capital cities has picked up for the first time in over two years, sparking fresh concerns about housing inflation. Cotality data shows rents rose 3% in the year to July, with Sydney and Brisbane leading the hikes.

 

AI start-up Perplexity has lobbed an unsolicited $52.8 billion bid to buy Google’s Chrome browser. The move comes as a US court considers forcing Google to sell Chrome after ruling it illegally monopolised the search market.

 

Around a hundred locals and visitors gathered in England’s Cotswolds for what they called a “Dance Against Vance”, a not-so-subtle message to US Vice-President JD Vance, holidaying nearby.

Fear-o-meter

The ACTU is pushing for a four-day work week in its proposal to the Economic Reform Roundtable in Canberra next week. Here's ACTU President Michele O'Neil's argument:

 

Shorter working hours are good for both workers and employers. They deliver improved productivity and allow working people to live happier, healthier and more balanced lives.

 

Unions want all Australians to benefit from higher productivity – not just those with money and power.

 

Productivity growth does not automatically translate to higher living standards. If that were the case over the past twenty-five years, the average worker today would be around $350 a week better off.

 

For workers in some sectors, shorter working hours can be delivered through moving to a four-day work week. For other people, this could be achieved through other ways, such as more time off or fairer rosters.

 

A fair go in the age of AI should be about lifting everyone’s living standards instead of just boosting corporate profits and executive bonuses.

Fear & Greed Q+A today

Speaking to Ausbiz about Commonwealth Bank's new partnership with OpenAi, makers of ChatGPT:

 

"AI obviously is a technology that we see over the long term is going to bring real potential opportunities and certainly risks and threats. From our perspective, we know it's important to build capability both internally with our people and use that capability to deliver great experiences for our customers and also to protect our customers and keep them and their money and their information safe.

 

There's a small number of globally leading  companies, one of which is OpenAI. We announced a multi-year partnership with them. We've already got a partnership and a small equity investment in Anthropic, which is another of the large language model research companies based in the US. And again, I think it's all about building capability at CBA, but this is also a part of an important, I think, national debate and discussion because this sort of technology, I think, will have significant implications, certainly over the long term and we need to have a very clear strategy in Australia and obviously across different industries and specifically for us, obviously the Commonwealth Bank."

It’s Thursday the 14th of August. Commonwealth Bank reported a record $10.25 billion cash profit yesterday, right on expectations. But investors sold off the stock, which closed down 5.4pc, driven by concerns over the outlook and the bank's expensive valuation. A drop of that size for Australia's biggest company made for a tough day on the local market, with NAB and Westpac both dropping too, but the big switch from banks to miners continues - BHP, Rio and Fortescue all climbed.

Greed-o-meter

Market	Median profit
Sydney	$700,500
Melbourne	$376,000
Brisbane	$480,000
Adelaide	$430,000
Perth	$339,000
Canberra	$420,000
Hobart	$282,978
Darwin	$157,250
Combined regionals	$280,000
Australia	$365,000

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97pc of house resales in the first half of this year delivered a profit for the sellers, according to Domain. And in many cases, those profits were very large indeed.

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Source: Domain Group's Profit and Loss Report