Insights

Achieving Net Zero carbon emissions is critical to long-term climate goals.

2022 is shaping up as potentially another challenging year, with the combined effects of the ongoing COVID crisis together with evolving inflationary pressures presenting governments and central banks around the world with some challenging policy decisions.

During his 2020 election campaign, President Biden made commitments to relieve the economic hardship being experienced by a rising percentage of the US population, as well as fast-tracking decarbonisation of the economy to meet the challenge of global warming.

The Australian Government recently released its plan to reach Net Zero emissions by 2050, finally joining the long list of countries already committed to achieving this target by 2050 or sooner.

Now that is money well spent!

Infrastructure, interest rates and inflation: 3 dynamics that are commonly linked, but often in an incomplete manner that does not reflect the full story of their correlation.

Consistent with trends in past budgets, the 2021 Federal Budget saw the Commonwealth Treasurer identify a further A$15.2 billion in new spending on major infrastructure projects, keeping the decade-long infrastructure investment program at A$110 billion. This will spearhead the Federal Government's efforts to boost both jobs and productivity in the COVID-affected national economy.

While the speed of ultimate decarbonisation remains unclear, there appears to be a real opportunity for multi-decade investment as every country moves towards a cleaner environment.

To state the obvious, 2020 was a year like no other. The COVID-19 pandemic presented challenges the likes of which individuals, businesses and governments have never experienced before. The impact of this was to push an otherwise pretty robust global economy into recession, force lockdowns and create social dislocation on a previously unimaginable scale.