RBA's tough task; Westpac profit falls; hardest workers revealed

RBA's tough task; Westpac profit falls; hardest workers revealed

News in brief

Strong competition for loans and deposits pushed Westpac’s annual earnings slightly lower, although the country’s second largest bank announced an improvement in profit margins. Chief executive Anthony Miller said small businesses were still hurting.

 

The Liberal Party is split on the issue of climate change, once again putting Opposition Leader Sussan Ley’s position in jeopardy, with several senior conservatives in favour of dumping net zero.

 

The Senate Inquiry yesterday into the triple zero outage at Optus six weeks ago was a feisty affair. Optus chief executive Stephen Rue partially blamed Nokia for the handling of the outage, saying that some “personnel failings” were from the Finnish telco company.

 

The hardest workers in the country are miners, farmers, surgeons and politicians, according to an analysis of census data by the Sydney Morning Herald. Assistant drillers, a common job on mine sites, have the nation’s longest average full-time hours at 70.3 hours a week. Beef cattle farmers work 54 hours, general surgeons 52.5 hours and CEOs just under 50 hours. GPs, primary school teachers and airlines pilots are all around the 44–45-hour mark.

 

Its Melbourne Cup Day and I’ve been studying the form. Since there is a jockey in the race with the superb name of Thore Hammer Hansen, riding a horse called Flatten The Curve, which reminds me of the bond market, and it originally comes from France, which is where I recently lived, it’s my (not so) hot tip.

Fear-o-meter

The economy is starting to get a little tricky for the Reserve Bank. Yesterday’s raft of data shows a slowdown in the pace of growth of household spending – in fact per capita spending probably went backwards in the September quarter – as well as signs that the labour market is weakening.

 

Spending, no doubt, has been helped by interest rate cuts and tax cuts. But there are no more of those in the foreseeable future.

 

Yet inflation remains a problem. It remains the number one public enemy and that will be the number one concern for the central bank.

 

The RBA board will focus on inflation, but they may also have to give a nod to the fragility of the recovery in the consumer sector and the weakening of the labour market.

 

No rate cut, but plenty to chew on.

Fear & Greed Q+A today

Last week Apple became a $US4 trillion company. But there are still a few concerns about the tech giant:

"Apple would be the one that I'd be worried about when it comes to AI. We still really haven't got anything concrete in terms of strategy where we're moving forward with what's next for AI. They've fallen behind, I think, a little bit in terms of integrating AI. Yes, we had Apple intelligence. We had those new iPhones coming out, which, the results that they actually delivered were... they didn't set Wall Street on fire, but its outlook offered sort of that reassurance that that flagship product, that hardware is still doing the heavy lifting, can still deliver.

 

iPhone sales sets a sort of drive double digit growth next quarter, forecasting for what could be the best holiday season they've ever had. So still delivering on that front. But I think unless we hear more from them on AI, Tim Cook has held his cards pretty close to the chest with that... They said that we're going to increase investments in AI and product development. But I think they've fallen behind the AI race over the last 12 months."

The Australian economy is showing signs of slowing, with household spending and the labour market weakening, just as inflation picks up. The household spending indicator rose just 0.2 per cent in September, well below expectations, and the previous month’s growth rate was revised down to zero. Per capita spending over the September quarter which feeds into economic growth, was probably negative. The Reserve Bank board will meet today with a bunch of very mixed data points to consider. While no-one expects a rate cut, there are early signs that Australia is facing both slowing growth and rising prices.

Greed-o-meter

Category	Quarterly Change (%)
Health	+1.8
Miscellaneous goods & services	+1.2
Food	+1.1
Clothing & footwear	+0.8
Furnishings & household equipment	+0.4
Transport	0.0
Hotels, cafes & restaurants	−0.3
Recreation & culture	−0.5
Alcoholic beverages & tobacco	−6.8

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Household spending in the September quarter was largely driven by essential purchases - but look at how much our spending on alcohol and tobacco has dropped:

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Source: ABS, AMP