Michael Thompson

Because we saw last week it wasn't particularly good news.

Was it the Westpac Melbourne Institute Consumer Sentiment Index at its kind of lowest point, really, in its 50-year history?

Consumers are really...

Yeah.

You mentioned markets there in passing.

And I wonder, over the weekend, right, we have seen the largest IPO in history with SpaceX hitting Wall Street and a lot of investors from Australia trying to get in on that as well.

And you mentioned that markets have been at pretty good levels at Wall Street.

hitting records lately.

How much does that actually kind of counter a lot of the pessimism that is out there when you have this massive IPO, a couple more coming this year in terms of open AI, Anthropic, a lot of excitement, a lot of enthusiasm around that.

Does that help to balance out some of this pessimism that we're feeling?

It should.

One other thing that's coming out this week, and it's a smaller kind of, certainly the RBA meeting is the headline, but we get population figures this week, which matter obviously for housing, but there's a very strong political element to it at the moment when we are talking about population growth and immigration, which all feeds into this broader discussion.

Yeah, it's going to be a very big week.

Headlined, of course, by the RBA.

Enjoy it.

Thanks, Stephen.

Thank you, Michael.

Should be fun.

That was economist Stephen Koukoulis, better known as The Kook.

You can find him at thekook.com, T-H-E-K-O-U-K.com, or do what I do and follow him on LinkedIn.