Goldman Sachs offers this chart on central bank independence:

As covered today by Leith over at MacroBusiness here and here, today's ABS release confirms what most of us suspect, that wage growth in the long term is looking pretty bleak. Therefore it might be pertinent to think about how this outlook might affect you.

Fund results out today from S&P are not good for active fund managers:

Snapchat is listing shortly, probably early March. It's a unicorn, a start-up with a valuation over $1b. It's going to be valued at lots (USD25b?), and it loses money, which makes it hard to value. In the end, it's a lottery ticket.

AMP released their results last week, bringing with it news that it was reducing its adviser numbers across the network. This comes as no surprise given the results but does continue the trend of adviser number reductions across the big players in the market.

Last week I ran through the big long-term (20-40 year) economic trends (click here for the full post) that investors should be aware of, noting that a couple of these trends (women in the workforce, the ratio of workers to non-workers and maybe trade) are changing for the worse. Stage two (today’s ...

For the last six years, I have had a relatively consistent view on Australian asset allocation. The Australian economy was at the tail end of a commodity boom; investors needed international equities and Australian bonds while winding back exposure to Australian equities – click here for an example ...