Sam Watkins

I will breathe some sort of sigh of relief.

Indeed, indeed.

Yeah, look, the US also, I guess, is a challenging one because like ourselves, there's a lot of external inputs to what data we're seeing in the States.

One large part of that being, of course, Iran war and the expectation of when that might end and when we might see the energy complex start to reprice lower.

At this stage, the first piece of data that we've seen in the US has been that there is a softening of the employment market over there.

At the same time, what we've seen is a change in the governor.

Obviously, now with a new Fed governor, where there was originally an expectation that that might put downward pressure on rates, the expectation now is probably one more for hold and a very data-dependent forward trend.

So our outlook for US rates actually is for a hold also with the possibility of a cut being the next move still.

Now the market is pricing one hike in the next 12 months in the US and so we would be contrary to that view.

We would be flat to one cut.

I think probably the only thing that I would highlight is there are different markets that have different levels of sensitivity to interest rates.

So Australia is a great one to highlight.

New Zealand is similar and the UK as well.

And perhaps Canada is another one that you could put into that category.

All of those markets generally have mortgages that are floating rate.

And what that means is that you have a very quick transfer of the impact of interest rate hikes into the mortgage market and into spending and consumer confidence.

And that's certainly what we're seeing playing out.

And so our expectation generally would be that where we see interest rates in those different economies start to look out of touch perhaps or too high versus those other markets that don't have that translation or that transfer mechanism in place.

That's where we would see particularly interesting opportunities.

I think that's a really interesting quote from Warren Buffett.