Empower Blog Economic conditions

Q&A with our Treasurer, Scott Morrison

As a buyers agent and property expert, it's always a great opportunity when you get to talk to the Treasurer. You get to ask questions on current policies, pick the Treasurer's brain on political issues and most importantly, voice your opinion on the industry. In this Money Magazine's November 2016 Edition, Bryce is given this opportunity to pose ...

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Is the Australian Property Bubble about to Pop?

Hi Ben Kingsley here and in this Empower Wealth How to Video session, I want to talk about whether the Australian Property Bubble is about to pop. Well, the first question is, are we actually in a bubble at all? We've seen the Sydney and Melbourne property prices go very strongly over the last 3 or 4 years. And that is an interesting point, isn't i...

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RBA Rate Decision – December 2016

So much to talk about in this December Rates Announcement! Firstly, we'll start with interest rates on hold at 1.50%. The Reserve Governor and the Board met and kept rates on hold. Now, what's fascinating is if we had have waited another day, when our GDP numbers came out in Australia, we could have seen a different result. As you know, there's so...

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Should You Invest In Property Overseas?

As a Qualified Property Investment Advisor, I often get approached by clients asking me about investing in property overseas. They've been on a recent vacation, and they bring back a brochure telling me about this amazing opportunity they've got in Bali, Spain, the UK or in America. Ultimately, I try to dig into the main motivation for them to inve...

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2016 Global Economy & Equity Outlook (Part 4) | Australian Economy

Here are the other parts of the 2016 Global Economy & Equity Outlook: Part 1: United States Economy Part 2: Asian and European Economy Part 3: Commodities Market Part 4: Australian Economy Ben Kingsley: So now let’s come into Australia. Where do you see – again we started pretty sluggishly, terrible sort of start. The first days of t...

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2016 Global Economy & Equity Outlook (Part 2) | Asian and European Economy

Here are the other parts of the 2016 Global Economy & Equity Outlook: Part 1: United States Economy Part 2: Asian and European Economy Part 3: Commodities Market Part 4: Australian Economy Ben Kingsley: Let’s go into China and more broadly speaking, Asia. Where do you see the Asian and obviously the biggest economy in that market? Seco...

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RBA Rate Decision – September 2015

Hello Ben Kingsley here. Thanks for watching this RBA video announcement. As you can obviously pick up, I'm not in the office as I usually am at the moment. I'm currently on a family holiday up in tropical North Queensland. What an interesting time to take a holiday. In fact the last time, as I was saying it to my wife, that I took a holiday lik...

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RBA Rate Decision – August 2015

Today the Governor and the Reserve Board met and kept interest rates on hold for another month. Now, they are continuing to stay at record low levels where the cash rate remains at 2%. Now for a first in this commentary series that you may have seen or may not have seen before, I'm going to actually cut to some audio of Glenn Stevens presenting a...

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RBA Rate Decision – July 2015

Today the Governor and the Board met and kept the cash rate at 2%. We saw changes in February and also in May of this year and now again, the Governor and the Board is basically just waiting to see what happens. The biggest news story at the moment is obviously the Greece story and they have default on their loan. In last weekend they have...

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RBA Rate Decision – June 2015

Hello, today the Governor and the Reserve Board met and they've kept interest rates on hold. Now this was widely anticipated. The facts are, at 2% cash rate, it is at historically low level and if we were to actually move rates further down which we do have capacity to do if you look at the minutes for May 2015 Cash Rate. They are saying that we...

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RBA Rate Decision – May 2015

Today the Reserve Governor and the Board met and they've dropped interest rate once again to 2%. So following the February rate cut, they've followed it up with a May rate cut. Now the reason behind that is simply the spare capacity that we are still seeing in the economy. They've made a judgement call, even before we see the May 2015 budget ...

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RBA Rate Decision – April 2015

Today the Reserve Governor and the Board met and they've kept interest rates on hold for the April 2015 board meeting. That has kept the cash rate at 2.25%. Now, why had they kept the rate on hold? Well the reasons come down to a few things. To begin with, they've probably seen some early signs on the economy starting to pick up. Those early ...

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RBA Rate Decision – March 2015

Today the Reserve Bank of Australia decides to keep rates on hold after dropping rates by 25 basis points last month. Now looking at the Board Meeting minutes from last month, it was a bit of a flip of the coin whether they were going to drop rates in February or potentially wait until March. Ultimately, we all know the outcome of that. They d...

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