Musical chairs for the global economy

This is the Fear & Greed Afternoon Report - everything you need to know about what happened in the markets, economy and world of business today, in just a few minutes. ASX up 0.3pc Trump criticises allies ARN terminates Kyle Sandilands EV adoption higher in cities Warner Bros CEO ...  Show more

Wednesday 18 March 2026 The Reserve Bank has lifted interest rates, but it was a close call, and another rate hike in May is no longer a sure thing. The competition regulator warns petrol stations over the price of fuel Australia heads towards a free trade deal with the EU The be ...  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