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5 November 2026
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Phil Ruthven is the founder and director of IBISWorld, Australia's best-known business information, forecasting and strategic services corporation
Every decade brings surprises, but discombobulating ones are more rare - being the 1910s, 1930s, 1940s and 1970s in the last century. We are just into the 2020s, but it already looks like a volatile decade.
There are many reasons why the market places too much emphasis on the short term, but taking a long view on growth, inflation, markets and sectors will lead to better policies and investments.
The Australian stock market is skewed towards mining and financial services which account for a whopping 55% of market capitalisation. In the US, these two account for only 17%. But there's more to our underperformance.
We need to think hard about how we work and live in the future. How do governments, health gurus, individuals, politicians, businesses and social groups need to act in 2021, both in dealing with COVID and thereafter?
The impact of the pandemic on Australia's debt and deficit has forced the government into borrowing on a scale unimaginable at the start of 2020. What are the implications, and what is even more important?
57 million people die every year, including over 3 million from respiratory diseases. Why is COVID-19 allowed to panic nations around the world and destroy so many businesses and jobs?
Politicians are fighting over access to super, but they may be arguing about the wrong thing. The system’s three fundamental flaws have been hiding in plain sight for decades, costing Australians far more than they realise.
Why do some families preserve wealth for generations while others struggle to? As the great wealth transfer unfolds, the determining factor is often not the structure of the estate, but the preparation of those who will inherit it.
For years, bank hybrids have been a cornerstone of portfolio income. With tens of billions of dollars now disappearing from the market, investors face a critical question: what comes next, and are the obvious replacements enough?
What happens when knowledge becomes a commodity? The latest themes emerging from the US tech sector suggest AI could reshape company moats, disrupt incumbents and create winners and losers in unexpected places.
Warren Buffett's departure marks the end of an era. But the more important question for investors is whether Berkshire's culture, discipline and capital allocation framework can survive without the man who built them.
For years, retirees have been told to focus on withdrawal rates. But the real question is far simpler: how many dollars can you safely spend? The answer may be very different from what conventional retirement wisdom suggests.
For more than a decade, investors lived through an era of near-zero interest rates. With bond yields now surging, it's worth asking whether cheap money solved economic problems, or introduced a much larger set of risks.