Empower Blog Economics

Property Market Update – Positive Start to 2024

As part of the Empower Wealth community, I wanted to share with you my initial thoughts on the property market in 2024.   Based on indications from our team on the ground and the initial data we are collecting, the property market in 2024 has begun stronger than initially expected.  What is interesting about this shift in the ...

Read More

RBA Cash Rate July 2019: Twice in a Row?

Today Governor Lowe and the Reserve Board met and they changed the cash rate for the second consecutive month, dropping the cash rate down by another 25 basis points. This is reasonably well-signaled, even though some economists still thought that the RBA may wait until August. So, what is their agenda? Well, if you look at the minutes — and ...

Watch Video

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...

Watch Video

Future of Mortgage Lending in Australia : Risk Profiling and Pricing

Hi Ben Kingsley here, I just want to talk to you about what's going to be the future of mortgage lending here in Australia. Now, before we talk about the future, let's think about what happened in the past. In the past, we used to see mortgages that are like this. We had standard variable rates, and those standard variable rates were the main rates...

Watch Video

Is Property in Australia Affordable?

There's a lot of hype around the Australian Property Market and whether or not we are in a price bubble. Now the reality is, when we see low interest rates, what it means is it increases our ability to afford property. We got to understand the psychology behind buying property in Australia, just as in buying properties in most countries where we se...

Watch Video

Which is the best state to invest in?

As a property investment analyst and qualified property investment advisor, I'm often asked which is the best state to buy property in. But that's not necessarily the best question. There are over 9.4 million dwellings across Australia and those numbers increase around 130- 160,000 new dwellings every year. So on average, every week there's over tw...

Watch Video

RBA Rate Decision – September 2014

As widely anticipated, the Reserve Bank of Australia (RBA) kept interest rates on hold for another month at 2.5% and this is following Glenn Stevens's commentary to the government last month, around where he saw the cash rate and where he saw the general economy. From a cash rate point of view the take out of that meeting and from his commentary wa...

Watch Video

Improving Financial Literacy

In previous newsletter articles, we looked at the results of an international study which highlighted the high poverty rate amongst older Australians compared to other countries. In this newsletter, we look at a recent international study which casts Australia in a more favourable light. The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (P...

Read More

The era of entitlement IS OVER – What can be done?

Joe Hockey delivered the nation’s 2014 Federal Budget last Tuesday. He was true to his word about it being a tough budget and based on the changes they want to push through the senate and bring into law, it certainly didn’t miss any of us, as their catch cry stated “we are all in this together”. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it agai...

Read More

Is Australia really a good place to grow old?

You may have been pleasantly surprised earlier this month to read in the newspapers that “Australia ranks 14th out of 91 countries in a new index of the best and worst places to grow old, and which warns many nations are ill-prepared to deal with the old age time bomb.  In a rapidly greying world, the Global AgeWatch Index - the first of its kin...

Read More

Will Property Prices Keep Increasing – a 38 Year Analysis – part 2

In last month article I highlighted the returns of 3 different Melbourne suburbs over a 38 year period and in this article I promised to explain how this happened.  In doing so, I have included three new graphs of each Suburb to help illustrate my findings. To help you interpret them I will just explain what is consistently measured in each gra...

Read More

John Maynard Keynes – does that name ring a bell for you?

Well if you are someone who has studied economics, it will definitely ring a bell.  Those who haven’t well, this English Economist was influential in helping the world get through the Great Depression, by convincing governments to use fiscal and monetary stimulus to kick-start the global economy with his macro-economic theory around business cyc...

Read More

Will the Property Market crash in 2013?

Well folks, it is December 21, or as the Mayans call it, April Fool’s Day." - Jay Leno What a relief to know that the Mayans predictions didn’t come true in December last year despite the huge media exposure it received.  But sometimes you could be excused for thinking that the reporting of property in the Australian media is similar ...

Read More