Markets Overview
- ASX SPI 200 futures little changed at 6,593.00
- Dow Average down 0.2% to 31,438.26
- Aussie down 0.3% to 0.6925 per US$
- U.S. 10-year yield rose 7.1bps to 3.2035%
- Australia 3-year bond yield rose 7bps to 3.28%
- Australia 10-year bond yield rose 6bps to 3.78%
- Gold spot down 0.2% to $1,822.56
- Brent futures up 2.0% to $115.38/bbl
Economic Events
- 11am: (AU) Australia to Sell A$150 Million 3% 2025 Bonds
Stocks fell after last week’s powerful rally, with investors rebalancing their portfolios in the final days of the quarter.
At the start of a week expected to be marked by fickleness and lack of conviction on a market trough, the S&P 500 had a hard time finding direction throughout most of the day. The tech-heavy Nasdaq 100 underperformed as Treasury yields climbed.
A selloff in US Treasuries deepened Monday after the second of two coupon auctions drew weak demand despite offering the highest yield in more than a decade.
Market volatility sparked by fears of recession is behind the current trend of corporate- and sovereign-bond deals getting withdrawn. Issuers have pulled 16 transactions globally so far this month, the most since Bloomberg started monitoring figures in February, after Russia began its invasion of Ukraine.
Other News
Australia’s population has grown at a steady pace in the past five years, new census data shows, despite the number of new arrivals slumping due to Covid border restrictions in recent years which blocked most travel to and from the country.
There were 25.4 million people resident in Australia in mid-August 2021 when the census was conducted, according to the Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2 million more than in 2016 and more than double the level 50 years ago, in 1971. That number would likely have been higher without the pandemic, as the number of people immigrating plummeted in the past two years.
More than 1 million people moved to Australia since 2017, but 84% of those arrived before the coronavirus did, with only 166,000 people arriving in 2020 and 2021, the ABS said Tuesday. Australia has one of the largest foreign-born populations in the world, with 51.5% of Australian residents either born overseas or having at least one parents who was born outside of the country in 2021.
People originally from India and Nepal were the fastest-growing communities over the five-year period, with Australians residents born in Nepal more than doubling since 2016 and India now the third-largest country of birth, after Australia and the UK. At the same time, Mandarin Chinese is the most commonly-spoken language to be used in Australian households after English, with nearly 700,000 people using it at home, according to the report.
It isn’t only the country’s foreign-born population which has seen high levels of growth in the past five years. About 813,000 people identified as Indigenous Australians in the most recent survey, an increase of more than 25% in the past five years. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders now make up about 3.2% of the population in 2021, up from 2.8% in 2016.
The latest census also revealed a steep decline in Christianity in Australia. Less than 44% of Australians said they were Christians in 2021, down from 52.1% in 2016 and 61.1% in 2011. There are now almost as many atheists as there are Christians in Australia, with 38.9% of citizens saying they had no religion.
The fastest-growing religions in Australia are Hinduism and Islam, each with about 3% of the population identifying with that faith.
