ASX Runners of the Week: Latrobe, Curvebeam, Arrow & Sultan

It feels like a rinse-and-repeat of the Bad News Bears for global markets, with no obvious reprieve in sight.

That was certainly the mood among commodity analysts this week after oil kicked off proceedings at an uncomfortable US$110 a barrel, following an Iranian-backed Iraqi militia attack that knocked out a major Saudi pipeline carrying roughly five per cent of global oil supply. Even JP Morgan’s commodity team is in shambles, admitting that for the first time since the Iran conflict began they “Don’t have a baseline view. We simply don’t know how to model the endgame.”

Oil cooled a little as the week progressed, but once the genie is out of the bottle, inflation has a nasty habit of hanging around. Every truck, ship, supermarket and household eventually feels the pain of triple-digit oil.

And, right on cue, the US 10-year Treasury yield finally cracked through the psychologically important five per cent level as the Federal Reserve locked in its first rate hike since 2023. New Fed Chair Kevin Warsh delivered a decidedly hawkish message, lifting rates by 25 basis points and signalling another increase – at least - could arrive before year-end.

Amazingly, Wall Street found some serious buyers to end the week as bond yields eased and commodity prices rebounded. The US 10-year yield slipped back below five per cent, ending a relentless nine-session surge and traders did what they do best – pretend nothing happened.

Unfortunately, back home, ever-increasing bond yields tend to seriously filter through to mortgage rates, business lending and housing affordability. The same politicians who spent years celebrating rising house prices are acting surprised that young Australians are fed up with an unfair housing market and tax environment.

True to form, Immigration Minister Tony Burke emerged this week to tackle the housing crisis, announcing that the Government was finally getting serious about cutting migration back to the previously promised – and immediately ignored – levels.

In one of the more remarkable political performances of the week, Australians were effectively told by Tony that the property squeeze isn’t really about record population growth colliding with chronic underbuilding. Instead, the problem is that Australians are not packing enough people into each home.

Naturally, the fact that newly built homes are getting smaller and multiple apartments are shrinking in size is a non-factor to Mr Burke, whose level of accountability this week matched only that of his liar-in-chief, Anthony Albanese, who was conveniently away for talks on mass immigration.

Old Tones took it a step further, suggesting migration is actually the solution to housing, rather than the problem - demand and supply don’t exist!

Of course, the fact that many of Labor’s safest seats also happen to contain some of the country’s largest migrant communities has absolutely nothing to do with it, pure coincidence, apparently.