Australian Treasurer Jim Chalmers yesterday said the impact of the new US administration’s policies would have a “seismic” impact on the global economy, ahead of his fourth national budget due to be handed down tomorrow.
Chalmers said he is expecting a small boost to revenue in the upcoming fiscal blueprint, but the global economic chaos sparked by the return of US President Donald Trump to the White House has “cast a shadow over this budget.”
“This is a whole new world of uncertainty that we’re dealing with here. The changes out of the US are not surprising, but they are seismic,” he said in an interview with Bloomberg in Canberra.
Photo: Bloomberg
“We’ve got conflicts in the Middle East and Europe. We’ve got political uncertainty and division around the world. The budget is designed not just to respond to all of that uncertainty, but to make ourselves more resilient in the face of those external shocks,” he said.
Australia is due to hold elections by May 17 at the latest, with Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese expected to start the campaign within weeks. His center-left Labor government is neck-and-neck with the opposition in opinion polling, but there has been some minor improvement over the past few months as the vote approaches.
Albanese has struggled to address voters’ concerns over a national surge in the cost of living, including a housing crisis and a rate hike campaign by the Reserve Bank of Australia to curb inflation.
However, with the central bank cutting interest rates for the first time in four years last month, Chalmers said the national economy is “turning a corner” despite the global pressures.
“We’ve got inflation down, real wages are up, and incomes are strengthening. Unemployment is very low by historical standards. We’ve got the debt down, interest rates have started to come down, and now growth is rebounding solidly in our economy as well, led by the private sector,” he said.
Elon Musk’s lieutenants have reached out to chip industry suppliers, including Applied Materials Inc, Tokyo Electron Ltd and Lam Research Corp, for his envisioned Terafab, early steps in an audacious and likely arduous attempt to break into the production of cutting-edge chips. Staff working for the joint venture between Tesla Inc and Space Exploration Technologies Corp (SpaceX) have sought price quotes and delivery times for an array of chipmaking gear, people familiar with the matter said. In past weeks, they’ve contacted makers of photomasks, substrates, etchers, depositors, cleaning devices, testers and other tools, according to the people, who asked not to
Taichung reported the steepest fall in completed home prices among the six special municipalities in the first quarter of this year, data compiled by Taiwan Realty Co (台灣房屋) showed yesterday. From January through last month, the average transaction price for completed homes in Taichung fell 8 percent from a year earlier to NT$299,000 (US$9,483) per ping (3.3m²), said Taiwan Realty, which compiled the data based on the government’s price registration platform. The decline could be attributed to many home buyers choosing relatively affordable used homes to live in themselves, instead of newly built homes in the city’s prime property market, Taiwan Realty
JET JUICE: The war on Iran’s secondary effects have seen fuel prices skyrocket, knocking flight schedules down to earth in return as airlines struggle with costs Airline passengers should brace for more irritation in the next few months as carriers worldwide cancel flights and ground planes to cope with stratospheric increases in jet-fuel prices. Dutch flag carrier KLM is the latest company to cut its schedule, saying on Thursday that it would scrap 80 return flights at Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport in the coming month. That puts it in the same league as United Airlines Holdings Inc, Deutsche Lufthansa AG and Cathay Pacific Airways Ltd, which have all pruned itineraries to mitigate costs. Global capacity for next month has been reduced by about 3 percentage points, with all
Taiwan is attracting a growing number of foreign jobseekers as companies increasingly recruit overseas talent to ease labor shortages and expand global reach, recruitment platform 104 Job Bank (104人力銀行) said yesterday. More than 40,000 foreign nationals searched for jobs in Taiwan through the platform last year, a 28 percent increase from a year earlier, the company said. Malaysians accounted for the largest share of overseas jobseekers at 12.2 percent, followed by Indonesians at 11.9 percent and Vietnamese at 10.8 percent. Indonesian applicants surged more than 50 percent year-on-year, while Vietnamese jobseekers rose by more than 30 percent. Applicants from the
RSS