The Saturday Edition | 11 July 2026
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is the Saturday edition of Fear and Greed, business news you can use. I'm Michael Thompson, and good morning, Sean Aylmer. Good morning, Michael. Sean, our Saturday show is all about the two of us each nominating what we think is the biggest business story of the week, the most remarkable business story, a mystery category that we change up every week, and then our favorite business-related story. It is a competition. We need to have a winner. And so we have a judge, and that judge is our fear and greed colleague, Adam Lang. Adam, good morning. Good morning, Michael. Good morning, Sean. Morning, Adam. Now, Adam, as we go today, you are judging us often harshly based on a strict set of criteria that you...
apply semi-strictly.
Take us through your criteria. Okay. Chief amongst them is economic impact. And then it's got to be topical and timely because it is business news. We do like a bit of reform bias, love productivity. And if you can throw in some melodrama, entertain us. This is new.
never mentioned productivity as a key criteria before.
Well, it's implicit in reform. I've called it reform. Okay. Now I'm being more specific. Okay.
Well, I am in trouble because I have not planned for anything related to productivity reform. I don't even know what the word means. No, no, no, no. I'm just going to drop it in a few times throughout the show and just see whether I can maybe just by mentioning it. More out of less, stuff like that. Hey, sounds good to me. Sean, would you like to get going? We've got a real focus on efficiency and really, well, productivity this morning. So you get going.
Yeah.
I'll get going.
Unfortunately, the biggest story this week, unfortunately, war, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Sing it again. Whoa, whoa, whoa. War, what is it good for? Absolutely nothing. Frankie goes to Hollywood. This week, it appears that both the US and Iran have disrupted their ceasefire. They didn't break it. They disrupted it. Very hard to know exactly what's going on. It began when Iran fired at three ships. The U.S. retaliated. In over 48 hours, the U.S. hit 170 targets. Then several Gulf companies, including Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, reported apparent Iranian attacks. At one point, Donald Trump, when asked about the ceasefire and whether it was over, he said, I quote, End quote. 24 hours later, he said Iran had called.
They wanted a deal. It's not quite causing chaos in markets at the moment. The taco trade is still going on. Trump always chickens out, still matters, but just huge uncertainty. Clearly the biggest story of the week. We've almost become a bit sort of defensive about it. It is such a big story, but it's kind of like, oh, once again. That sort of says something about how the war has progressed, but very worrisome.
Ah, it is a big story, honestly, yes. But... But... It's also kind of a situation that we've been dealing with for weeks now, right? In terms of, as well as in terms of the on again, off again nature of the ceasefire, which I am still just constantly amazed by that this has been, this ceasefire has been in place. So this week was different, Michael? Not different? That is correct. This week was much the same. I think that is something happened this week that was very different. That has not happened to this particular company. And that is why it is the biggest story of the week. It has been an exceptionally tough week for Australia's biggest telco. All right, Adam, take notes. Major outage on Wednesday morning.
Software glitch essentially causing timers to malfunction, kind of going back 20 years. It took a lot of people offline and critically prevented hundreds of triple zero calls from getting through. Services were mostly restored that same morning, fully restored within the day before a second issue cropped up related to the first one. Really bad. The technical reasons for why this happened are probably less important for this story as compared to the impact and the way it's then managed, I think. A lot of damage was done to Telstra this week. And I think that is partly because consumers are already so wary of
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Chapters
5 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:06–7:09
2
How has the Iran–US conflict escalation affected regional security and markets?
7:09–14:00
3
What caused Telstra's major national outage and who was affected?
14:00–19:56
4
How did Telstra's executives respond and what regulatory consequences are likely?
19:56–35:29
5
Why did China’s submarine missile test alarm Pacific neighbours this week?
35:29–37:06