It doesn't feel like stuff is going up in price as much as it used to - do you also feel the same way? We recently had the US release their CPI figures for April. It came in at 4.90%. This is one for the record books folks - 10 straight months of declines. And we are seeing inflation falling faster than it rose - hard to believe isn't it? Don't believe me? Here are the figures: CPI increased by just 3.80% in the 10-month leading up to its peak of 9.10% in June of 2022, compared to a fall of 4.20% since.

Allow me to pull back the curtain and give you a snippet into how the consumer is trending right now. US households are in excellent shape, the ratio of liabilities to net wealth has declined 50% since the GFC, and household leverage is currently at levels last seen in the early 1980s. See chart below.

Everyone loves a bear market - especially the talking heads you see on TV. Bull markets are harder to love. The narrative of the bears just seem a lot more sophisticated than the bulls'. They feed off of our fear - it's pretty simple if you ask me.

Hello. I don't recall having as many school holidays when I was a child as my two children do, and certainly not for as long! After taking our 2020 trip to Vanuatu in 2023, we're back in town. Kids are back at school and financial markets continue to bamboozle investors.

What a year 2022 was, and what a first quarter of 2023 it has been. The market is finally cracking from the rapid rise in interest rates from central banks around the world. However, only certain segments are cracking. It doesn't appear to be a wild bushfire - yet. And I'm not saying there will be one either.

We were all cheering for a hold on rates by the US Fed. Alas, we were greeted with a short jab to the guts with a 0.25 bps rise. It's pretty tough out there at the moment, as we have seen and read with all that is unfolding with the US and European banking system. Yet central banks are sticking to their script.