Musical chairs for the global economy

Tuesday 5 May 2026 National Australia Bank has warned that rising fuel prices are putting the squeeze on small and medium size businesses, even though the sector has held up well so far. $217b wiped off ASX in 2026 ASIC’s Accent insider trading investigation a2 Milk detects toxin ...  Show more

Despite solid lending growth, particularly in business banking, NAB’s half year results yesterday came in a tad below analyst expectations. NAB CEO Andrew Irvine explains to Sean why the bank is preparing for uncertainty, even while key activity barometers remain strong. Irvine a ...  Show more

It’s a widely held assumption that US President Donald Trump has put globalisation into reverse. But Neil Shearing, group chief economist at Capital Economics and author of The Fractured Age: How the Return of Geopolitics Will Splinter the Global Economy, tells the FT’s world tra ...  Show more

“A bank and a steel company can walk into a bar and not have much to do with each other. But once one of the arena companies walks in, we’re all involved.” That’s McKinsey Global Institute director Chris Bradley. On the latest episode of The McKinsey Podcast, Chris spoke with glo ...  Show more

The US housing crunch is bad—and it’s getting worse. Wider access to safe, affordable homes is vital to enabling economic mobility for all Americans—and to harnessing what McKinsey Partner JP Julien, a leader of the McKinsey Institute for Economic Mobility, calls a “massive” unta ...  Show more

Banking has had a couple of very good years—the best, in fact, since the global financial crisis of 2007–09. Yet to some, the industry’s outlook seems less buoyant than recent profitability might suggest. On this episode of The McKinsey Podcast, McKinsey Senior Partners Klaus Dal ...  Show more