Steve Daghlian

And this has been a pretty busy week.

US earnings aside, we had the Reserve Bank, of course, on Tuesday raising interest rates for the third straight meeting.

That's for the third time this year.

But there were some signs that maybe, you know, from the governor's

presser that they might be happy to sit on the sidelines, at least for the time being, perhaps, to wait and see how things unfold in the Aussie economy.

And then we've also had three major Aussie banks handing down their results over the course of the week with mixed results overall.

Absolutely.

So losses across all the big banks today.

Westpac certainly the hardest hit down about 4.8%.

That is for good reason, though.

It's trading ex-dividend today, which is the cutoff eligibility to a payment.

So buying shares in Westpac today onwards won't get you that 77 cent per share interim div that's due to be paid out to those who are eligible on the 26th of June.

That dividend just a cent higher than what it paid 12 months ago.

We've got Macquarie Group today down by about 1.1%, which doesn't sound great, but it actually is outperforming most of the bigger players today.

Now, it came out with its full year results.

It beat the market's expectations, the second biggest full year result, in fact.

And if you look at the half year, the second half of the year,

It was actually a record half for the group.

So it basically doubled what it earned in the first half, raised its final dividend as well.

So it's paying out $4.20 per share to shareholders who are eligible.